Joseph in Jail

How is your memory of the Book of Genesis? With all the drama, epics, and archetypes, Genesis is just packed! Let's run through a few. 

Creation, creation again, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood(creation yet again,) the Tower of Babel(that would be another creation story,) Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, Lot & Co., Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Esau, Leah and Rachel, playing host to angels, wrestling with angels, brother-betrayals, famine, journeys to Egypt, and a whole mess of "begats!" Some of these moments, characters, and plots resonate with my life. How about yours?

One dramatic moment happens when Joseph was first a servant, a slave, for Potiphar, who was "an officer of Pharaoh, captain of the guard." Joseph gets on well in his job until the day he is falsely accused of inappropriate physical contact by Potiphar's wife.

And Joseph's master took him and put him into the prison, the place where the king's prisoners were confined; he remained there in prison. Genesis 39:20

There was no trial, no evidence-gathering, no judge, and certainly no jury. The way Egypt worked in those days was the way that authoritarian systems work most of the time. The most important factor in the economic, justice, and social system is the relative power of each person. What is important is who has power, who carried the day, and can be expected to show power in the future. The playing field isn't even supposed to be level. It's supposed to be the way it is.

In our time and nation, we hold to ideals of a justice system that is based on something other than the preferences of those in power. We have tried, with varying degrees of success, to establish a law enforcement that is just. It may be that for you law enforcement has been just, appropriate, reasonable, consistent – fair. That wasn't the case for Joseph.

Joseph needed circumstances – fate – to turn around for him. That's just what happened. He made his way back into trust, out of jail, and upward in the Egyptian realm until he was as powerful as anyone, anyone who wasn't the Pharaoh himself. Actually, the Bible attributes the turnaround using its well-known explanation, "because the Lord was with him; and whatever he did, the Lord made it prosper." In fairness, the text also gives some credit to Joseph's skills, although if we say Joseph was a gifted steward we consider who it was gave Joseph the gift.

Have you been falsely accused? Have you been locked up or just locked? Have you been in a position where you didn't and couldn't move forward in your job or your relationship with someone? Have you ever been stuck? If in your difficult time you have longed for deep sustenance, then you know the direction God's help comes from. Consider your heritage.

You inherit the love of God that God has for all creation – open yourself to the possibility that God's love is available to buoy you up. You inherit a practice of praying for just what you need (your daily bread) and no more – open yourself to the hope in that prayer. You inherit a way of living in which each of us shares with each other (see Acts 4:32) – open yourself to your brothers and sisters in faith that they might know your need and share with you their strength.

Joseph did find his way out of the fix where he was stuck. May this be your story too! May you always find your way through the stuck places you encounter and realize that those stuck places do not completely define your life. Your life is alive in the very being of God, the Holy One, the Source. That is where you live and move and have your being. The place where you're stuck? That's just a place you are in "for now!"

Winter Trees

Prompted by a comment by my old friend Ed Burnet:

I stood in a forest yesterday as a slanting, winter afternoon sun cut through the air. The dogs were sniffing around and all the chaotic calligraphy of bare branches surrounded us. It felt like God was unashamed of the barrenness, the deathlike off-switch of winter. It felt like God invited me, reminded me to look unafraid at what there is to stop and see, whether that be a happy lab, a crimson sunset, an empty cross, or sunlit trees.

photo from jdpilgrim on Flickr

Home for the Holidays

Dear Ones,

When we travel "home for the holidays," we do so for lots of reasons.  When we choose not to go home or there is no longer a home to go to at the holidays, that has great meaning in our lives too.

Do you remember your Genesis stories?  In Genesis chapter 3, "therefore the Lord God sent [Adam and Eve] forth from the garden of Eden."  We, represented in the story by Adam and Eve, are sent away from home at the beginning of the Bible epic.  It is a stunning scene.  Yet, when I read this text, God doesn't seem all that angry.  I think God is disappointed – even heart-broken – that the acts of these people have the consequence that they must leave the home God prepared for them.  They have to leave because of what they did.

Later in Genesis, chapter 12, God speaks to Abram.  God promises that Abram is going to be the start of something wonderful, in "the land that I will show you."  God's promise is that Abram (Abraham) will come home.  This is God's idea!  Nothing that Abraham has done so far in the story triggers this promise.  Abraham and Sarah move on in their grand adventure because God initiated the adventure.

God understands that coming home is not a return.  Coming home is more than the fulfillment of a nostalgic hope for a lost time when things were simpler, warmer, more welcoming.  God's idea of coming home is that we answer a call to a new place, a changed reality, in which we will be surprised to discover that we fit in ways we had not fully imagined.  Beloved, here is what we discover when we have come home: that our spiritual and other gifts are newly valued, that giving up our former trajectory through life is the most liberating thing we've ever done.  And in our God is Still Speaking theology, we understand that we can turn toward God's invitation to come home again and again.

That is what change is about.  That is what our inventive God is up to in our lives, yours and mine.  That is how you can calm down in the face of new family combinations, new friendships, and new rituals.  That is how you can be the person you are right now, in 2012, not merely a shadow of who you were back in the day.

How might you claim this understanding at Christmastime?

In the Christmas story, what happens?  A baby is born, that's all.  

Oh wait.  That's not all.

In this story, God takes an action.  God comes to us "in the flesh," in the presence of a baby.  God demonstrates that God is with us.

God is saying to us, "Where you are at home, there I am at home with you."

May you find your moments of home in closeness to God who longs to be so close to you that you feel right at home.

Peace and Blessing and Merry Christmas!
Pastor Brad

Seeds and Blessings Scattered

A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell …

- Matthew 13, Mark 4, Luke 8

The sidewalks around my neighborhood are covered with small seeds from some kind of maple tree.  You know the ones I mean.  The ones that spin as they fall through October skies.  In this part of the world, they are all over the place.  Much harder to see are the seeds from the grasses and wildflowers.  They too are all over the place.  Some land in a good place and others don't.  They are scattered extravagantly.

I hope you are familiar with the parable of the sower, the beginning of which is quoted above and which appears in three gospels.  We often use the parable to illustrate how words of truth and good news may land in good places within us and also in places they will not live and grow.  We hope that we are fertile ground or may become fertile ground!

You may also reflect upon how the seeds in the parable are, like the seeds in our neighborhoods, scattered wildly.  It is as if the sower, the maple trees and grasses, and the one from whom all blessings flow have an inexhaustible supply.  It's okay that some seeds fall on the path and get trampled.  It's okay that some seeds fall on the street and get pulverized.  It is okay that God's blessings fall on ears that cannot hear them.  There are plenty more where those came from.

The extravagance with which God dispenses grace and blessing tells us what God is like. God's grace is an expression of the nature of God.  There is no divine calculation about the percentage of blessings that will be thankfully received.  God is not choosing to love us because it is worth the effort.  God just can't help it.

That is a characteristic of the kind of divine love that we are cultivating in our shared journey of faith.  We are trying to grow and transform ourselves into people who love extravagantly.  We practice by loving those we fall in love with, those who are part of our families, those who we count as neighbors.  We continue to practice by loving those who are not immediately lovable, those who we don't know, and those who we see as our enemy.  I use the word "practice" because I know that you struggle toward this elusive goal just like I do.  It is so much wiser to control our love and kindness.  It is a savvy calculation to avoid wasting our time forgiving those who are not repentant, to "let go" of relationships that are not reciprocal, and to dismiss "them" – all those who any fool can see are not "us."  When we are being farmers at Stearns Farm, we are careful to plant each bulb of garlic in good soil.  We don't waste the garlic by scattering it in the woods.

Beloved, when it comes to giving of ourselves, we are not farmers.  Leave that analogy behind.  We aspire not to farm but to do something for which we must seek another kind of analogy or another story.  We tell the story of Jesus.  The way we tell the story, we tell of a man who at some point stopped making the calculations about how much to give, about how much his love and even his life was worth.  He emptied himself of all such understandable expectations and said to his God what you practice saying to your God, "thy will be done."  

When you say what Jesus said, you move toward the true, extravagantly generous, persistently kind, foolishly loving you that you are meant to be!

Pray with me now?  O Holy One, thy will be done.  Amen!