Sunday Sermon: Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28

As usual, a sermon never quite reads the way it “preaches” for a variety of reasons. With that in mind, here is my general manuscript for the message I preached this morning.

In 1962, a recording company executive heard about a new band coming on the British scene. He had serious doubts at the possibility of their success and said, “We don’t think the Beatles will do anything in their market. Guitar groups are on their way out.” Thomas G. Watson was the chairman of the board of IBM in 1943. With all the confidence in the world he once said, “I think there is a world market for about five computers.” A man named Lee DeForest invented the cathode ray tube in 1926, and when asked about the possibilities for that invention he remarked, “Theoretically, television may be feasible, but I consider it an impossibility – a development which we should waste little time dreaming about.”

Each one of these men looked at their current situation and assumed that was pretty much the end of the story. In a way, I can’t blame them. Their read of the data, their read of the situation, simply didn’t seem to suggest any other possibilities. World history is full of dreamers and scoffers. We know stories of countless optimists who dream about an unknown future and see possibility when the situation seems to call for skepticism, and we know countless pessimists who feel that we shouldn’t waste our time with dreams, visions, or thoughts about the future. To make matters even more complicated most of us are not fully one or the other! Most of us have no difficulty moving from one extreme to the other!

The story we find in Genesis 37 is one of the most important parts of the story of Joseph, one of the greatest dreamers of all time. Joseph’s history is enough to make a good soap opera. His father Jacob worked for his future father-in-law for seven years to win the hand of Rachel in marriage. After all that time, he was tricked into marrying her older sister Leah. And even though he ended up married to both Leah and Rachel, Leah was the wife who gave birth to six sons before Rachel ever became pregnant. Joseph was the firstborn of the beloved wife Rachel. Eventually, Jacob fathered twelve sons in all, and as you might imagine there was just a little bit of sibling rivalry between Joseph and his brothers. After all, Jacob doted on him. The coat of many colors we’ve heard about over the years was a symbolic mark of distinction and favoritism that generated all kinds of jealousy.

It certainly didn’t help matters that Joseph was a dreamer who couldn’t keep his dreams quiet. In between the verses we’ve heard read this morning, Joseph tells of a dream he has in which he and the family are out in the wheat fields. His wheat sheath stands up and all the others gather around and bow down to it. Of course, they are all a little outraged. “Do you mean to tell us we’re all going to end up bowing down to YOU?” Not understanding diplomacy or tact, Joseph says, “Well I had another dream too. In that one, the sun, moon, and eleven stars are all bowing down to me.” At this point, they’d all had enough and went off into the sheep pasture, probably to get away from Joseph and all of his annoying dreams.

Jacob, who may not have been the sharpest tool in the shed, sent his youngest out check on his eleven brothers wearing his fancy “I’m-better-than-all-of-you” coat. Well when they see him off in the distance, they are not happy. You can almost see the brothers seething with jealously and hatred as they see him coming off in the distance. So, they plot to kill him. By God’s grace, somewhat more reasonable minds prevailed and Reuben the oldest brother says, “Maybe we shouldn’t kill him outright, let’s just throw him in this pit here,” thinking he might rescue him later on. So they strip off his coat to trick their father, and throw him into the pit. But like any good angry mob, things kept spiraling and they decided on a different plan. They ended up selling Joseph to a foreign caravan of traders on camels heading to Egypt. And the last thing we see in this passage is Joseph heading off to Egypt.

Now this is the point where I hope you’re thinking, “OK, so Joseph is an annoying little brother with big dreams and he gets thrown into a pit and sold to foreign traders and hauled off into Egypt. How inspiring!!” I hope you just might be wondering why that is where the story stops this Sunday. I believe that it’s an important place to stop reading because it shows us something profound. Even the most optimistic, hope-filled, forward-thinking dreamers sometimes end up in a pit. It doesn’t matter who you are or how bright and cheery you are, there are simply times in your life when everything seems to crash in on you. I know this happens to you, because it happens to me! You lose loved ones, things get complicated in your family or in relationships, things change at work or at church, financial problems develop, you deal with unexpected losses, someone swerves into a parking space in front of you at Wal-Mart (ok, maybe that’s not so bad), but there are a hundred things that can begin to test even the most optimistic hope-filled people in the world. These things happen to the pessimists among us too! The only difference between an optimist and a pessimist is that the pessimist assumes the worst before the fact so they don’t have to face risking disappointment! Trust me, I come from a long line of pessimists and the pessimists’ motto is, “If I assume the worst, anything positive is icing on the cake.” No matter if you’re an optimist or a pessimist, there are simply times when you think the pit, the struggle, and the bad news is the end of the story. I imagine Joseph felt that way as he was tied to the back of a camel and led down into Egypt.

In 1993, the Buffalo Bills of the National Football League were in a pit. They were playing the Houston Oilers in the AFC wildcard game. Midway through the 3^rd quarter, they were down 35-3. They were in the pit. It would have been easy for them to give up. They could have looked up at the scoreboard and looked around at the long faces and said, “Well, this is the end of the story. We’re bound to lose.” But that wasn’t what they did. They realized that the end of the story hadn’t happened yet. They were just in the middle of the story. Frank Reich, the backup quarterback who was playing in place of their injured starter had been in tight spots before. He had led the Maryland Terrapins to one of the greatest comebacks in college football against the Miami Hurricane, so he knew that it wasn’t over until it was over. He confidently led the Buffalo Bills up and down the field never giving up. At the end of overtime, the scoreboard read 41-38 as the Bills upset the Oilers in one of the greatest upsets in NFL history.

Joseph could have looked at the scoreboard and seen brothers 35, Joseph 0. He could have thought about his ripped up coat and the long trek to Egypt and said, “It’s over.” But he didn’t. He was a dreamer. He knew that by God’s grace, this was just the middle of the story. Those of you who know the story realize what ended up happening. Even though things got even worse in Egypt, Joseph eventually became the right hand man of the Pharoah in Egypt, overseeing all the grain production in the entire land. Using his gifts for dreaming and vision, he stored up grain before a long famine and eventually even ended up saving his own brothers and family. By God’s grace, Joseph’s story was transformed from despair to victory.

An interesting map is on display in the British Museum in London. It’s an old mariner’s chart, drawn in 1525, outlining the North American coastline and adjacent waters. The cartographer made some intriguing notations on areas of the map that represented regions not yet explored. He wrote: “Here be giants,” “Here be fiery scorpions,” and “Here be dragons.” Eventually, the map came into the possession of Sir John Franklin, a British explorer in the early 1800s. Scratching out the fearful inscriptions, he wrote these words across the map: “Here is God.”

Like Joseph in the pit, we don’t know what the future holds. But like Joseph we do know the one who holds the future. We know the Giver of all good dreams, we know the One who provides our vision, and we know that in whatever future we all move into, God is already there. As Corrie Ten Boom once said, “Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.” No matter where you are or what you’re facing, you’re just in the middle of your story. You may look into the unknown future and say, “there be giants,” “there be dragons,” or “there be pits,” but by trusting in the One who holds that future you can look straight into the unknown and say, “There is God.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Fun with Wordle

There’s this really cool website called wordle (h/t Hacking Christianity) where you can create your own word-clouds from any text you choose to paste in the site. To try this out, I pasted my recent D.Min. paper on Job. Here’s the result:

Just to see what else I could come up with, I pasted last Sunday’s sermon:

I actually think this is a really helpful tool for preaching. If you want to see what your focus is, at least by the amount of times you use certain words, paste it in wordle. See what you get. Just for fun, I’ll leave you with the first sermon I preached as a commissioned Elder!

From Crisis to Confession

Since John over at Come to the Waters is wrestling with Moses and the snake out in the wilderness, I thought I’d post an old sermon that I wrote on this. This one ended up in the online edition of Preaching Magazine, so it’s one that I look back on fondly. Here you go:

From Crisis to Confession: A Sermon on Numbers 21:4-9

The people of Israel were “hacked off.” It’s right there in the Bible, they were hacked off. Oh sure, the translation in your pew bible says “impatient,” but in Hebrew it doesn’t say impatient it says qatsar. Qatsar mean making something shorter, and was also used to describe the harvest. When the grain in the field is harvested – it gets qatsar – cut off – shortened. That’s exactly how the people who the wandered around following Moses through the middle of nowhere were described. They felt as if they had been cut down, their fuses were short, and they were at the end of their rope. But most of all they were simply hacked off. Being impatient is sort of a nuisance – we get impatient as we wait to pay for our gas at the convenience store while someone ahead of us leisurely scratches off their lottery tickets hoping to win a dollar or two. Being hacked off is more intense – we get hacked off when someone nearly runs us off the road as we’re driving.

The people of Israel were at the end of their rope. Moses had led them out of Egypt, but now they were in the middle of nowhere and things were more difficult than they ever expected. Along the way they had made enemies, and now they had to go hundreds of miles out of their way to travel around Edom, a country they were forbidden from crossing. A hundred mile detour makes a huge difference when you’re walking over rocks and through steep valleys – especially when you’re wearing sandals. Blisters and calluses were beginning to take their toll. God had provided manna and quail, but visions of Egyptian buffets danced in their heads. No doubt about it, they had had enough.

The old saying goes, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” However, I’ve often found that when the going gets tough, the tough start complaining. That’s just what Israel did. During my time as a professor, I found the same thing to be true. When the tests scores were bad, it was rare that I heard someone say, “You know, I really should have buckled down and studied. I wasn’t ready for that test.” Generally I heard people saying, “That was too hard, can we get a big curve!?” Just like a group of unruly students, when the tests in the wilderness got hard, the Israelites started complaining about everything: What kind of leader would bring us out here in the desert to suffer? What kind of God leads his people around in the desert like this? All of a sudden, even enslavement back in Egypt started looking good. Complaints filled the air – the attitude of God’s people was as poor as it could be. In no time, people doubted God and questioned His reason for bringing them out of Egypt in the first place.

The story then takes a terrible turn, “Then the Lord sent poisonousserpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.” You know, I thought about entitling this sermon, “Complain about your leader and get killed by poisonous Snakes,” but I didn’t think that would go over too well – and all kidding aside, I don’t think that’s what this passage is talking about. Whatever the reason God sent snakes among the people, and it is likely impossible to know fully, there can be no mistaking the fact that this was a terrible crisis in the camp. Things just as mysterious and frightening happen in our lives – people who are apparently healthy just days find cancer slithering into their lives and find they only have months or weeks to live. Marriages begin to unravel. People in our families make poor choices with devastating consequences. We may not face literal snakes, but the symbolic snakes in our lives can be just as frightening and destructive. Like the Israelites, as we travel this world we’re all too familiar with crises in the camp and many times that leads us to question our faith and even to question God.

Yet somehow through the grace of God, against our own inclinations, crises can lead to confession. The Israelites took stock of what they were doing and examined their lives. When we encounter snakes in our lives – poisonous relationships, poisonous health issues, tragic losses, or seemingly insurmountable odds – it is time to take stock and see reflect on what matters most. The people of Israel very simply say to Moses, “We have sinned by speaking against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD to take away the serpents from us.” The crisis of the snakes led Israel to confess their failings as God’s people. Not only did they turn against the leader God sent them, but they rebelled against God as well. Is it wrong to question and be confused? No way – the only way this becomes sin is if we decide to rebel against God and call it quits – the ultimate danger is letting the crises of our lives cause us to turn our backs on our faith.

The crisis of the snakes helped God’s people realize that their very lives were in the hands of God. Even though the situation in the wilderness was one of difficulty and challenge, the very fact that they had survived this far was evidence of the ongoing presence of God in their lives. Sometimes it takes a crisis to wake us to this kind of truth. Before I answered God’s call to ministry, I worked in a research lab even though I was sick and tired of it. I had resolved to plow through and just go down the path I had planned. But in the middle of this I encountered a crisis. My father was checked into Saint Francis hospital in Tulsa. My wife Nanci and I made several frantic trips back and forth from Oklahoma City, where we lived, to Tulsa thinking he was going to die at any moment. Even though my father pulled through that difficult time, something changed within me. The crisis led to confession. I understood like never before that our lives are gifts and we never know how long or short they might be. For me, life was too short to do something other than pursue God’s call on my life. The crisis in my life led me to confess I wasn’t doing what God had planned for my life. Every single one of us will have points of crisis in our lives, just like the Israelites surrounded by snakes. Yet, God’s grace offers opportunity for growth in the midst of danger. By God’s grace we’re offered hope in the middle of hopelessness.

Moses prayed and God responded. As Israel confessed their disobedience and admitted their utter need, God responded. God told Moses to make a serpent of bronze and to lift it on a stick. Those who were bitten needed only to faithfully respond to God by looking at the snake and they would be healed. The snake wasn’t magic – it was the sheer power of God that brought salvation into a frightening and horrific situation. There is no situation that cannot be transformed by confession and trust in God’s means of salvation. Sometimes, like the Israelites looking at the bronze snake up on a pole in the wilderness in order to be rescued from their snakebites, God’s means of salvation looks a whole lot like the catastrophe we face. Sometimes, through the transforming grace of God, the darkest situations we face in our lives can actually lead to our healing and salvation.

We don’t need to look any farther than our faith in Jesus to see the truth of this belief. The cross was more deadly and humiliating than any snakebite, but it is at the cross where God’s greatest triumph takes place. The people confessed to Moses, he interceded and trusted God. The people lift up their eyes and receive healing, not from the deadly serpent, but from the very hand of God. It is through the suffering and shame of the cross that God offers transforms the entire world.

Nearly every one of us who was raised in church knows John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.” But how many of us remember the two verses that come before 3:16, “…just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” In what was apparently the greatest defeat of all time, God’s own Son was lifted on the cross. Yet in the providence and grace of God it is through Christ was raised from the dead and we are offered eternal, full and abundant life. Following God and trusting Jesus Christ means looking at the frightening and tragic situations of our life in a new way. Through Jesus Christ, nothing in this world is beyond being used for God’s redemptive purposes in our lives. Whether it is the sickness of our loved ones, the loss of a job, the struggles of a family member, the unraveling of a marriage, or the death of a friend – through God’s grace any of these situations offer one more opportunity for resurrection and can be transformed from the most frightening snake to the most miraculous salvation.

Elightening Children’s Sermon

L.L. Bean Flashlight Some of my best children’s messages come at the last moment as I’m walking out the door, and I think, “Oh man, I need something to say to the kids this morning!!” This morning, I had an idea that went with the L.L. Bean Wind ‘N Go flashlight that I had sitting above my computer desk.

My kids had been playing with this flashlight and left it on all night long. After a long night on the shelf, the light was about as dim as it could possibly be while still being on. In a way, it looked a little like I felt! All of a sudden, I had a spark of enlightenment.

I took the flashlight to Church this morning, and showed it to the kids, asking them what was wrong. With a little direction, they correctly answered that the battery had gone dead. At that point, I showed them that it was a special kind of flashlight that we could recharge by winding the crank. As you may have guessed, I made the analogy with the way we sometimes lose our light and run out of steam and feel like we’re not connected with God (O.K. smarty-pants, I know this was over the heads of all but about three kids – children’s messages are for the adults & pastor too, you know!).

I then gave each of them a turn at the crank while I said things like, “We pray, we study the bible or listen to bible stories from our parents or grandparents, we go to Church, we sing songs,” and then I wound the thing like crazy while I said, “We listen to the sermon!” You can kind of hear the light whir pretty loudly, so this got a big laugh here from the adults.

I then pushed the on button and the thing nearly blinded the poor girl sitting in front of me! Two of the smaller kids yelled, “There’s a light!” There was a slight “Ohhh…” in the crowd, and I said, “Don’t get ahead of me now!” I then talked about how all these things we do help us be closer to God, and when we do we become lights in the world – shining out the message of God’s love. Trust me, it was much better than my sermon!

Elightening Children’s Sermon