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!"

Poised Between

Just at the end of Genesis 3, the story reads, "After Noah was five hundred years old…"  Five hundred years old!  This is the beginning of the story of Noah and the Ark and The Great Flood. History begins again at the moment the ark, laden with animals, begins to float through the driving rain, and everything else that had come before matters no longer. 

            Is it a story of creation?  Is it a story of destruction?

            There is the strong element of God's disgust with the sorry state of the world, an emotion we and all readers are expected to share.  There is the idea to wipe everything out and start with a clean slate, which we are expected to go along with since it's God's idea (and maybe you've felt so frustrated with some situation in your life or in the world that you've had the idea yourself.)  And then there's the sheer power of flooding the whole world.  Here the power of nature and the power of God are one; irresistible force and an immovable, deaf-eared, embodiment of judgment.

            In the midst of destruction is a creation.  All the animals, enough of all kinds of food, and a whole family of human animals to help out, are held safe in that ark.  The ark is like a basket of groceries with all the ingredients for a feast inside.  God takes a mulligan on the whole Adam and Eve thing and starts a new world with suitable provision.

            God expresses deep regret, once the waters had settled, and promises not to wipe us all out ever again.  Still, there was no going back to the way things were before.  Had everything changed?  Well, yes and no.  Certainly a lot was just gone.  Yet Noah and his family lived on and they had memories.  The animals represented some substantial evolutionary adaptations and those are embedded in their continuing lives.  And the earth was restored to the wonderful, habitable place it had been.  So there was some carryover from the earlier times.

            We are, each of us, asked to live in history.  We have a past in which we were formed and in which we formed ourselves.  Our challenges include dealing with that trail of stories, of learning, of accumulated wisdom and regret, and all the ways in which we've started over again; again and again.

            We are also asked to look to the future.  We will face new challenges.  Our challenges include adapting, changing ourselves to deal the parade of joys and difficulties that tomorrow and the rest of our lives will bring.

            We encounter a deep spiritual truth when we see that each moment we live, this moment right now for instance, is a moment in which we choose how much from the past we rely on and how much to change.  It is a recurring dance between what we know, or believe, has worked before (write a letter and mail it) and what we choose to do afresh (video-chat with relatives far away.)

            This may feel uncomfortable to you and you may feel anxious.  How are you supposed to dance this dance?  Perhaps another deep spiritual truth will open a way for you. 

            Each of these moments, poised between destruction and creation, poised between past and future, poised between repetition of the known or entering the new, each of these moments is its own "now."  We only really live in this moment.  So look at your hands.  Look up at the space around you right now.  Then clasp your hands together and look at them, at the choice you have made to hold your own hands.  And offer up a prayer of thanksgiving; for all that has been, for the day or days that lie before you, and for this moment, this precious now.  Here's a prayer you could use, if you like.

Dear God, you have been there always and you choose to be in the future to which I'm going right now.  Thank you for each of these moments of choice.  Thank you for my capacity to observe "the now" of now.  Let me rest in your regard, in your everlasting arms for a little while.  Then I will take up my life, our life that you and I are building together out of the past, and move forward with you into our future together.  I lift you up as you lift me.  Amen.

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!