Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; January 7, 2024
Readings: Genesis 37:1-11 (children’s talk); The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine §179; Arcana Coelestia §§91, 92
As I said to the children, from now until Palm Sunday we’ll be following the story of Joseph. The theme of the Joseph story is that Joseph’s uprightness and his confidence in the Lord are a blessing to him and to everyone around him, and that blessing endures and grows, even though Joseph is hated and trodden down again and again. Joseph’s brothers sell him as a slave, but he rises up and becomes a ruler in Egypt, and at last his brothers really do bow down to him. And the final triumph of Joseph’s greatness of spirit is that he forgives his brothers for the evil that they did to him.
In the internal, or spiritual, sense of the Word, one of the strongest themes of this story is the rise of the internal person and its mastery over the external. Joseph symbolizes an internal or higher level of our minds—a part of us that is wiser and more alive than anything that we find in the natural, external world. Joseph’s ten older brothers symbolize the external, mind. Joseph is meant to rule over his brothers. Right at the beginning of his story, he has dreams that declare that his brothers—and his father and his mother—will bow down to him (Gen. 37:7-10) The internal is meant to rule over the external.
But the external doesn’t want to be ruled. Joseph’s ten brothers were older than he was. It was their birthright to be higher in status than Joseph. If he’d had dreams in which he bowed down to them, they probably would have thought that that made sense. In a similar way, the external mind sees itself as superior to the internal mind. The external mind is the part of us that awakens first. We get comfortable living a natural life and thinking natural thoughts long before we start to be aware that we could live a spiritual life. And the natural mind doesn’t want to yield its place to the spiritual. Our next reading is a passage from The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine that gives us a clear summary of the relationship between the internal and the external person [read §179].
When we’re born, our spirits are upside down. “What ought to rule is what serves, and what ought to serve is what rules” (NJHD §179). Joseph is meant to rule over his brothers; but in the story that we’ll read next week they throw him into a pit. They physically place themselves above him. The external is above the internal. The reading said that the only way for us to be saved is for this order to be inverted; and it said that the only way that this can happen is if we allow the Lord to regenerate us, or make us new (ibid.). The Joseph story as a whole is about this inversion. It’s about the process by which Joseph is lifted up, and the process by which his brothers come to humble themselves before him. This is the theme that we’ll be exploring for the next several weeks.
Today we’re only looking at the beginning of this story. At the beginning of the story Joseph is clearly not above his brothers. He’s just seventeen and he has no authority over them; mostly he’s an annoyance to them (Gen 37:2). They resent him because they can see that their father—Jacob—loves Joseph more than he loves them (v. 4). If we look just at the literal sense of the story, the favoritism that Jacob shows to Joseph is kind of painful, but when we look at the internal meaning of this story it makes sense that Jacob especially loves Joseph. Jacob, like most of his sons, symbolizes an aspect of the natural mind, but he symbolizes the wisest part of the natural mind—the part of the natural that’s able to see the potential of this thing that Joseph symbolizes (AC §§4667, 4675, 4676).
But the piece of this introduction to the Joseph story that we’re focusing on today is Joseph’s dreams. These dreams set the stage for the whole arc of the Joseph story. Clearly these dreams are prophetic: right here, at the beginning of the story, we have a hint of the way that the story is going to end. And one of the really satisfying aspects of this story is that Joseph’s brothers’ efforts to make sure that these dreams never come true contribute directly to the realization of these dreams. Joseph would never have become a ruler in Egypt if his brothers hadn’t sold him as a slave.
In the teachings of the New Church, we’re told that Joseph’s dreams symbolize a declaration from the Lord (AC §4682). So we can think of these dreams as messages that the Lord sends to us. Joseph’s dreams are like hints or glimpses of the way that the Lord intends our lives to be.
And this is an idea that’s worth spending some time with. What has the Lord shown you about the way that your life could be? Everybody daydreams about the life they wish they had, but a lot of those dreams come from ourselves, not from the Lord. We daydream about living in the perfect house or driving the perfect car, and there’s nothing particularly bad about that—but the Lord is offering us something so much better than a car. What glimpses of heaven has the Lord shared with you? Are there memories, or specific teachings from the Word, or pieces of the life you live right now, in which you feel—or taste—joy that is not of this world? One of the takeaways from today’s sermon is that those dreams of heaven don’t have to be dreams forever: they can become your waking life. Those elusive glimpses of real joy don’t have to be elusive forever. Joseph dreamed that his brothers would bow down to him, and what he dreamed came to pass. The internal mind can rise within us. The Lord can make us spiritual people.
In order to get a clearer idea of what this change would actually look like, let’s look more closely at the things that Joseph and his brothers stand for. If we zoom in on the Joseph story, we find that this story is about a point in our lives at which we’ve already done some spiritual work. Of course the Lord takes people all the way from nothingness to heaven; but the Joseph story is specifically about a phase that’s somewhere in the middle of this journey. It’s about people who have learned the truths of the church, and believe that those truths are important, but who are mostly living those truths in a pretty external way. These external truths, or truths that are known to the natural mind, are what Joseph’s brothers symbolize (AC §§5741, 5409; compare §§4671, 4679).
Joseph, on the other hand, symbolizes truth that has the Lord’s spirit within it. Some passages from the Heavenly Doctrine say that Joseph represents the Lord Himself (AC §§5781, 5788). Other passages say that he symbolizes truth that proceeds from the Lord (AC §4669). Still other passages say that he symbolizes “the heavenly of the spiritual” (AC §§4286, 4592, 4675). That’s a confusing term, but essentially what it means is that Joseph symbolizes the goodness or blessings that proceed from the Lord’s own Divine truth. The Lord’s truth, or the heavenly of the spiritual, creates blessings wherever it is present. We see, in Joseph’s story, that abundance and prosperity follow Joseph wherever he goes. His very name comes from a Hebrew word that means “to increase.”
The simplest way to say all of this is that Joseph stands for truth that has the Lord’s spirit within it; Joseph’s brothers stand for truths that don’t have that spirit within them. These two kinds of truth look the same on the outside. Every teaching from the Word can be a Joseph truth for us, or it can be merely one of Joseph’s brothers. It all depends on whether we receive that truth with the internal mind, or with the external. For example, take the Lord’s commandment that we are to love one another as He has loved us (John 13:34, 15:12) The external mind can grasp the meaning of these words; it will nod and say, “of course we’re supposed to love people—I’ve known that since I was three.” But the internal mind gets this truth. It sees the spirit and the power of this teaching, and takes these things to heart and expresses them in action so that they bear fruit. When Joseph rules within us, then the Lord’s spirit and His power rule within us, and our lives are blessed. That’s what the Lord wants for us.
The external mind thinks it wants these blessings. If asked, the external mind would say, “Yeah, I want God to bless me.” But of course it isn’t as simple as that. God’s vision, or his plan for us, requires the external mind to step down, and yield its place to the internal. And that’s not easy. In practice, allowing Joseph to rule over us means being willing to give up the worldly things that we enjoy, if they stand in the way of our spiritual growth. It means giving up our pride in our ability to figure things out for ourselves. It means giving up our “right” to be the lords of our own lives. If all of this was supposed to happen in a moment, then the story would have had Joseph’s brothers bow down to him as soon as he told them of his dreams. But that isn’t how it goes. These changes take time, and they take work. Our sermon series on Joseph is going to be about this whole process. The message for today is simply that this change is possible, and it’s worth it.
Our final reading for today takes us back to those dreams of heaven that we talked about earlier. This reading is about the blessings that the Lord wants to give us—the blessings that He fully intends to give us. These passages talk about conflict between the external person and the internal person, but mostly they’re about the changes that take place within us when that conflict ceases, which is what happens when the external person finally bends its knees and lets the internal rule. We read: [AC §§91, 92].
The joy described in this reading is what the Lord holds in store for you. There’s probably a part of all of us that scoffs at statements like that. That part of us probably says things like, “the people who get there are the churchy goody-two-shoes types.” Or maybe the external mind simply says, “that’s nice, but I have no idea how I’m actually supposed to get from where I am to that vision.” Joseph’s brothers stand for our external minds, and when they heard his dreams, they scorned them.
Something that we can work on right now is responding to those dreams of heaven a little less like Joseph’s brothers did, and a little more like Joseph’s father did. In the story from Genesis we read: “And his brothers envied him, but his father kept the matter in mind” (37:11). Jacob was offended by the suggestion that he would bow to Joseph, just as his other sons were offended (v. 10). But Jacob, being older, was wise enough to wonder about Joseph’s dreams. What if they were true? So he kept a door open in his mind.
Are you willing to wonder? Are you willing to hold your mind open to the possibility that the dreams the Lord has shared with you could become the waking reality of your life? After all, with God all things are possible (Matthew 19:26; Mark 10:27).
Amen.