Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Joseph Part 1
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
It's not that you forget what happened. It's not that you never look back or go back. It's not that you never visit from time to time. But it is that when you move forward, you have to be ready to leave old things somewhere behind you. Welcome to the commons cast.
Speaker 1:We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information. Welcome today. If you are new, I'm Jeremy.
Speaker 1:I'm one of the people who hang out around here, but you have chosen a good week to join us for the first time. One, because it's Thanksgiving, but also because today we are launching into a new series. And it's actually our anchor series for the fall. It's our series on the character of Joseph. And here at Commons, we plan all of our teaching out a year in advance.
Speaker 1:You can find all of that in the journal to see where we are and where we're going. And if you don't have one yet, there's one in front of you in the pew if you're sitting in one. If you're in the gym, then they're available at the connection center at the back of the room. They're always free, and they were designed to help you get your bearings here at Commons. Both are teaching and also sort of what's going on and how we do things in the community.
Speaker 1:But this year, in this fall, we have decided to tackle the story of Joseph together. Now, in the past, we have worked our way through Abraham, and we've looked at Jacob, and so now we find ourselves at Joseph. And today, we're actually going to introduce Joseph by spending a bit of time backtracking to make sure we remember the stories of Abraham and Jacob well. However, if you're interested in those characters after today, and you want to dig a little bit deeper, both of those extended series are available online. If you go to commons.church, right at the top of the page, there's a button that says watch online.
Speaker 1:That will take you to the latest sermons from both of our parishes, Kensington and Inglewood. And then you'll also see the archives, you can search through and find old series and track through those if you want to as well. Today, however, before we look forward to Joseph, we have to look back to Abraham and Jacob. But before we look back to Abraham and Jacob, we have to look back to our last series quickly. Because we heard from a lot of you that the problem with prayer was a really meaningful dialogue.
Speaker 1:And for some of you, it was simply naming the fact that prayer can be hard. That it often doesn't make sense. That there are all kinds of paradoxes in prayer that can never be satisfactorily answered. And sometimes we just don't know how to do it or where to begin because for a lot of us, it's just sort of assumed that we will pick it up by osmosis over time. And there is a certain sense of truth to that.
Speaker 1:There is not a particular skill to prayer. There is no right way to pray. Prayer is, at the end of the day, any expression of honest wonder directed toward the divine. And so, hear me, you have prayed, and you have prayed well whether you knew it or not. I actually had a conversation with a friend about two weeks ago, and they were telling me about this really difficult situation they had found themselves in, and how they had found themselves running this situation through their minds over and over again one morning in the shower, which is where I think we all do our best thinking.
Speaker 1:I think we can all agree on that at least. But they found themselves pouring over this trouble until all of a sudden, they found themselves asking for help. And so, my friend said to me, you're a pastor. What would you say to an atheist who finds herself in the shower one morning asking someone for help? Would you call that prayer?
Speaker 1:And I said, I would call that sacred. Because as we talked about last week, prayer is often this space where our words to the divine become God's words back to us. And where our words for God become words meant for ourselves. And, maybe you are not sure about God, about what you think about God, about whether God works or whether God is, and none of that should stop you from praying. Because as long as there has been human beings, there has been this space for sacred speech.
Speaker 1:Especially when sometimes our faith is what eludes us. And so, hope that in that conversation over three weeks as we looked at the Lord's prayer, you found some sense of that freedom to reach out toward God in whatever way you need to in this moment. Now, this week, it's Abraham and Jacob, and then next week, Joseph, but it's also thanksgiving. So, let's pray and give some thanks. Our loving God, even as we speak prayers designed to shape ourselves today, to clarify our intent, and to point us in the right direction toward you.
Speaker 1:We pause to offer you thanks and gratitude, to recognize that these moments of shared memory where we mark thanksgiving on our calendars, they are important. Because they remind us that everything is gift. That breath, and life, and joy, and thanks, that all of it comes from the source of all that is good and holy in the universe. And that these moments, set aside on our calendars with scheduled thankfulness, They remind us to live always in gratitude. And so, as we offer thanks today, may we become more thankful people.
Speaker 1:And, as we welcome each other today, might we become more hospitable people. As we greet each other, may we become more graceful people this day. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Okay.
Speaker 1:Today, I do have a bit of a cold and my voice is already giving out. One service down, three to go, we're gonna make it. But, as I mentioned, we are gonna breeze through some of the memory of Abraham and Jacob so that we can set ourselves up for Joseph starting next week. And, the reason for that is that Joseph is written, or Genesis is written, as a story with chapters in it. The Hebrews would often call their God the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Speaker 1:And, that was a way of rooting their experience of God in their identity and their history as a people. So, they couldn't know God without the story of Abraham. They couldn't conceive of themselves without the story of Jacob. And, in fact, if you read forward and you read the next story that follows, which is Moses in the Exodus, the first thing you read is, then a new king to whom Joseph meant nothing came to power in Egypt. And so, even the start of Exodus is telling you to go back and reread what came before.
Speaker 1:So we can't do justice to Joseph without first remembering his family and where he comes from. And that is perhaps appropriate today on Thanksgiving weekend. That is joyful or difficult or pained or profound your experience of family has been. It is all part of your story. Now, that does not mean that family defines you.
Speaker 1:It doesn't limit you. You are not destined to become what your parents were, good or bad, and some of us are very thankful for that. But knowing your story is part of how you live your story well. And so, this Thanksgiving weekend, when we are with family, or missing family, or avoiding family, or going overboard cooking for family, it's a good time to start with Joseph's family. However, before we get to that, this week my phone knew that it was Thanksgiving, and it wanted to get me in the mood.
Speaker 1:And so it surfaced some old Thanksgiving photos that I might like to see this week. And so, in honor of all those who are eating turkey this weekend, I thought that I would present to you the last recorded evidence of me not only eating a turkey, but actually cooking a bacon wrapped butter basted thanksgiving turkey. This is eleven years ago in 2007. And for all of those who wondered if I was this thin because I don't eat meat, now you know that I was still this thin even when I was eating turkey and bacon and butter by the pound. Also, I was just a baby.
Speaker 1:Anyway, today, the story of Genesis or the story of Abraham begins in Genesis chapter 11. Terah took his son Abram, and that is Abraham. He's going to change his name a little bit later in the story, but I'm just going to use Abraham today for consistency. But Terah takes his son Abraham along with his grandson Lot and his daughter-in-law Sarah, wife of Abraham. And together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan.
Speaker 1:But when they came to Haran, they settled there. Terah lived two hundred and five years, well done by the way, and he died in Haran. Now, that's the end of chapter 11. Chapter 12 starts, the Lord said to Abraham, go from your country, your people and your father's household to the land I will show you. And this all sounds very biblical.
Speaker 1:Right? This guy has a son and he has a wife and they begat her and she begat them and God told them all to go somewhere together. Very nice. But, it's actually quite a remarkable moment in the story of Genesis. Walter Brueggemann writes that this moment between chapters eleven and twelve is perhaps the most important structural break in the Old Testament and certainly in Genesis.
Speaker 1:He writes that it distinguishes between the history of humankind and the history of Israel, the history of fall, and the history of blessing. And you see, this is where the story turns, towards God's plan for the redemption of the world. But, the remarkable part is that Abraham is on both sides of the story. So, a lot of the time, when people wanna talk about Abraham, they have this tendency to start the story in chapter 12, where Abraham is called, and Abraham goes, and God blesses all people through Abraham, makes him the father of many nations, and that's a great part of the story. I can certainly understand why people want to get there as quickly as possible.
Speaker 1:But, the end of chapter 11 is actually really important. And, it will be important when we make our way to Joseph. Because good stories often start in really difficult places. And if we start the story of Abraham, in chapter 12 where God calls him to the promised land, we miss the fact that the story actually starts with Abraham and Sarah and his dad and their plan that never happened. You see, years earlier, they had set out from Ur of the Chaldeans, and they wanted to move to Canaan.
Speaker 1:But somewhere along the line, they stopped in Haran, and they just stayed there. And then dad dies, and here's Abraham stuck in some podunk town he never wanted to be in, mourning the loss of his father, maybe wishing he could go back to where he grew up, and wondering what to do with himself. And, that's kind of relatable, isn't it? I mean, don't tell me that you haven't found yourself at some point somewhere you never intended to be. Maybe it wasn't even all that bad.
Speaker 1:Like, it wasn't a disaster. It wasn't really wrong. It just wasn't very purposeful. That's where Abraham is when the story starts. And, that's interesting.
Speaker 1:Because this is obviously a very ancient story, but it's also a story that I hear a lot from people all the time, especially younger people and older people. And I know that includes a lot of people, and I'm sure everyone feels that way at times. I'm generalizing here, but let me explain. I am right on the edge of the break between what we sometimes call generation x and the millennials. So I'm 40.
Speaker 1:I was born in 1978. The millennials are that group that was born in the eighties and the nineties. And so please remember this, when you hear people talking about millennials, we're talking about people in their thirties here. These are not little kids anymore. But aside from all of stereotypes of millennials that pervade social media, which by the way, don't really buy, there is often a sense of feeling unmoored in this generation.
Speaker 1:Like we kind of arrived here by accident. And part of the reason for that is, I think, that a lot of the social markers that used to signify the transition into adulthood have shifted. You're an adult when you get married. That doesn't happen in your twenties very often anymore. You're an adult when you buy a house.
Speaker 1:Well, that's not reasonable or attainable or, for a lot of people, desirable anymore. Even things like getting your driver's license, which was a really big deal when I was a kid, that doesn't that much anymore. I mean, who wants to drive when you can get an Uber or ride a bike or save your money to buy more avocado toast? And listen, leave avocado toast alone. It's delicious.
Speaker 1:And sometimes everything basic is beautiful, but those things don't make you more adult. They don't make you more mature. They don't make you more capable of navigating the world around you, but they did used to serve a social function. They served as markers. And they signified to the people around you that something had shifted.
Speaker 1:You were an adult. And we haven't really figured out what to place those or replace those markers with now. And so because of that, you do have a lot of people in their twenties and their thirties, and as I said, I'm right on the edge of that, so maybe people in their forties as well, who really aren't sure where to put themselves. They've done a lot, they've accomplished a lot, but they don't have the same social markers, and sometimes it feels like they kinda got here by accident. Now, the irony is that I also talk to a lot of people who are part of the generation that came just before me, and I have a very similar conversation with them.
Speaker 1:They aimed at marriage. And they aimed at a house, and they aimed at a career, and they aimed at retirement, and now they're retired. And somehow it still feels like they got there by accident. What do you do when you're retired? If all you did was work really hard all your life so that one day you wouldn't have to work anymore, what do you do when you don't work?
Speaker 1:And, this is actually part of what we talked about in the ritual series this spring, that relationship between work and rest and play. Because if you don't learn how to practice rest and play, retirement might not be as comfortable as you hope. But either way, I talk to people all the times. I feel at times like I've gotten here accidentally. And, what's beautiful about the end of chapter 11, what's beautiful about where Abraham begins, is that the bible names that space as holy.
Speaker 1:That intention, and persistence, and hard work, and goals, all of that is good, but sometimes God speaks to us when we find ourselves a little bit lost. In fact, part of the beauty of this story is that when God speaks in the lostness, it's not just to save us from it, it's to honor that place as part of our story. You see, I think part of the reason that Abraham's story starts in Haran is because God is saying that sometimes your detours are important. And, even when we find ourselves where we didn't intend to be, We find ourselves somewhere unfamiliar, or when we recognize that we've become acclimatized to somewhere we got a little bit stuck. Even that is part of the story.
Speaker 1:You see, we have a tendency sometimes after the fact to narrate our stories in ways that minimize our missteps. Maybe God is saying, don't. I mean, don't stay there forever, but don't despise the time that you wasted either. For me, this is part of my career story, because there was a time that I was a pastor, and then there was a time that I wasn't, and now I am again. That's compressing twenty years into 20 words, but the time when I pursued some other options.
Speaker 1:And I tried some other things that didn't work out, and I tried to fit myself into someone else's expectations of who I should be, and I found out who I wasn't. All of that is part of who I am right now. It's part of how I pastor. It's part of how I lead. It's part of how I make sense of God's calling and invitation in my life.
Speaker 1:And a lot of it came from what seemed like detours. So, if you feel like you are in a holding pattern right now, and that there is more waiting for you out there somewhere, then maybe it's important to remember that being where you are and allowing yourself to hear God speak even in this moment now is important. So, while you sit, and while you wait, and even while you seek some clarity about what comes next, Know that God is present in those pit stops even when they take longer than you expected. And that's important. Because when it's time to go, and it's time to move on, and it's time to go into what's next, that means it's time to leave what you knew.
Speaker 1:And when I say it that way, it sort of sounds silly. Right? Of course, that's true. But here's what's significant. When God finally speaks in the story, and Abraham has found himself waiting and wondering, and maybe contemplating going backward, God says, leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you.
Speaker 1:Now, in Hebrew, the contrast between leave from and go to is highlighted really strongly here in the language. In Hebrew, the key here is this little word min, which gets prefixed to the nouns, and it means from. And if you read this verse literally, what it says is, Abraham, leave from your country, and from your people, and from your father's household, and go to the land I will show you. Which, by the way, God doesn't even bother naming here. But, you get this repetition here.
Speaker 1:From, from, from, go away from everything that you know, and well, just trust me on where we're going. And that is intentional. The writer is talking about moving forward, which always means leaving something behind. And this is why detours are important sometimes. Because sometimes we're actually not ready to leave old things.
Speaker 1:And we're not ready to move forward, and that's okay. You don't have to be ready. There's a time to stay, and there's a time to hold on. There's a time to be exactly where you are right now, and to know that God is present to you even in that difficult moment. And then there is a time to move forward.
Speaker 1:And it's not that you forget what happened. It's not that you never look back or go back. It's not that you never visit from time to time. But it is that when you move forward, you have to be ready to leave old things somewhere behind you. And God very easily could have said, go to the place I will show you.
Speaker 1:Trust me, it will be good. Have faith, just do it. But the very first thing God says, the very first thing God asks of Abraham when he pulls him from this place of waiting is, are you ready to leave all of this stuff behind? Because you'll need to if we go somewhere new. And I find that often, when you are stuck, one of the most profound things that you can do for yourself is to simply sit and to breathe.
Speaker 1:And when you're ready to ask yourself, Is God calling you to breathe in and to be here now? Maybe to remember or to mourn, to stay, to be patient? Or is God calling you to breathe out? And to let go of something, to leave something behind, to embrace something that's new on the horizon? And the truth is, I don't know which one it is for you right now.
Speaker 1:Because both are good, and both are holy, and God is present to you in both seasons, I promise. But what I do know is that there's a time to breathe in and stay, There's a time to breathe out and go. And if we don't learn how to do both, then eventually we suffocate. And so the beginning of this family story that leads us to Joseph is this leave and go motif. It's this idea that life never stops.
Speaker 1:And that's important for everything that follows, both for us as individuals and for the story of Joseph we will get to. And yet, to say that does not mean that the going forward will be easy even when the time is right. Because as much as we are going to need this carry, this idea of moving forward in our mind as we come to Joseph, we are also going to need to keep in mind this idea of struggle and wrestle. And so, after we worked our way through Abraham, we spent a year ago working our way through Jacob. And Jacob is a character.
Speaker 1:I mean, in many ways, I think Joseph actually has the more interesting story, but nobody comes close to Jacob just for being an intriguing personality. Now, one of the things we're gonna see very early in the Joseph story is that Joseph gets sold into slavery by his brothers. This is terrible. But one of the first things his father did when he shows up on the scene is trick his brother out of his inheritance, so sibling rivalry seems to run very deeply in this family. But if it's Abraham's willingness to trust God and keep moving forward that sets the stage for Joseph, then it's Jacob's willingness to wrestle with everything and everyone and anyone that crosses his path that provides the counterweight in the story.
Speaker 1:You see, near the end of Jacob's story, after he has tricked and swindled and embezzled his way to wealth and fame, he is confronted with the return of his brother. Now, his brother Esau is depicted as this boorish, dim witted man at the start of the story when Jacob tricks him. But at the end of the story when he returns, he is surprisingly powerful and intelligent and wise and ultimately very gracious and forgiving. And I think perhaps what the writer wants to do here is remind us that often our first assumptions about people are wrong. But when Jacob realizes that Esau is coming, and he doesn't know his intentions, he tries to, in a very Jacob like manner, buy him off with some gifts.
Speaker 1:And so what he does is he gathers up all his wealth and all his flocks, and he sends them on ahead of himself to his estranged brother hoping that will soften him up. And then he camps out for the night and he waits to meet his estranged sibling in the morning hoping that by the morning Esau will have let go of all the past, and they'll be able to get along. But, that night, someone like an angel shows up, and actually physically gets in a wrestling match with Jacob. It's a very strange story. In chapter 32, it says that Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him till daybreak.
Speaker 1:And that's a very strange sentence. We don't know who this man is or where this man came from. He just shows up and starts wrestling with Jacob, and that is awkward. And eventually, we read that this man touched the socket of Jacob's hip, and so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man, which is very aggressive for this strange man. Bobby actually taught about this passage last year when we walked our way through this, and she told us about her titanium hip.
Speaker 1:True story. She's Wonder Woman. But, the tale continues here. And Jacob actually refuses to let go of this man until he gets a blessing from him. Somehow he seems to know that this Moan is more than just a random dude who showed up to wrestle.
Speaker 1:And so the man asked him, what is your name? Jacob, he says. And the man replies, your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel. Because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome. Now, if you didn't realize this, this is where Israel gets its name from.
Speaker 1:The people of God in the bible are named after the shadiest character in the story, and that's kind of beautiful. But, this name is a really interesting one. There's lots of debate about exactly what Israel means in Hebrew. I'm certainly not going to settle that today, but it seems to come down somehow to this idea of wrestling or struggling with God. In fact, the morning when Jacob gets up, he will say, I have seen the face of God in my wrestling.
Speaker 1:And, this is important. Because, if we take this idea of moving forward from Abraham, then we're going to need to carry this idea of struggle with us from Jacob. Because over the next eight weeks, we are gonna follow Joseph through some very high highs and some really deep lows. And it's beautiful on the front end to say, don't give up, keep moving forward, God is taking you somewhere new. But in the midst of the moment sometimes, it's really important to know that our struggle and our wrestle and the difficult journey is sacred as well.
Speaker 1:Because life is beautiful, but it's also very hard at times. And sometimes we hurt, and sometimes we mourn, sometimes we get ripped off and mistreated, sometimes people lie to us and they misrepresent themselves, and sometimes we do all of that too. And sometimes we struggle and we wrestle, and like Jacob, we still walk with a limp after it all. But the bible doesn't try to pretend that that's not true. Because part of what these stories offer to us is the fact that they're not easy, and they're not sanitized, and they don't comfortably fit into our tidy imagination of God's presence and purpose in our lives.
Speaker 1:They're a mess. And what they do is they welcome the whole of the human story into the presence of God. They name your struggle as holy. And they acknowledge your trust as sacred even when you're not sure whether you do. And so as we begin this journey together, we gather our footing and we prepare ourselves to find ourselves in the story of Joseph over these next few months.
Speaker 1:Maybe what you need to know is, right now, are you breathing in or out in this moment? Do you need to stay where you are and be patient and wait for new breath to fill your lungs? Or do you need to go? And you need to try something new, and you need to test yourself in new ways, and you need to leave something behind and push forward into something that's fresh, and beautiful, and terrifying all at once. Because you'll find yourself in the story either way.
Speaker 1:Or maybe, you already have tried. And you have pushed forward, and you left old things behind, and you're moving into something new, and what you found is that it's all harder than you thought it would be. And trust is thin, and everything seems like a struggle right now. Well, the beauty of the scriptures is that all of those stories are named, and acknowledged, and made holy before God, even your story wherever you find yourself right now. And so maybe our purpose in these readings is simply that we might come to recognize our story in the stories that we read.
Speaker 1:Because often, it is that recognition itself that flips the script from that critical disappointing voice we often hear in the back of our minds telling us it all should be easier, or better, or smoother, to that compassionate voice of God that says, everything is sacred and I am with you in this moment right now. Even when you are stuck. May you sense God's presence near you today. In your breathing in or your breathing out. In your struggle and your wrestle, and even in your limping home if that's what you need to do today.
Speaker 1:May you know that all of it is holy, and all of it is named in our sacred stories. Let's pray. God, as we begin this story of Joseph, we ground ourselves in the stories that have come before. The stories of his father, and great grandfather, the family lineage that leads to his, might we also recognize everything that has led to us. And, it doesn't define us or shape us, but knowing who we are, and where we come from, and where we're going is part of how we lose that critical voice that condemns us.
Speaker 1:And, finds that compassionate voice that encourages and comforts us. God, if we are breathing in right now, because we need to be patient, and stay and wait. Would you be present to us reminding us that that is holy? If we are ready to breathe out and leave something behind and go somewhere new and we're a little bit scared, would you be present to us bringing courage? Reminding us that life never stops, and we are always moving forward in some sense.
Speaker 1:And then God, if we struggle. And if everything feels like a wrestle right now, and we are limping our way home today. Might you remind us that even that is beautiful, because you are present in that wrestle and that struggle. That you heal and you comfort. That you welcome and embrace us when we reach you.
Speaker 1:And so, God, in our breathing in, our breathing out, and our wrestle, and our struggle, might we be shaped more into the person that you imagine us to be. And, might that exude through every choice that we make, and the courage that we face our day with. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.