It's great to be
back with you all again in this online gathering this week and next week - and
I look forward to gathering in person for worship in the parking lot comin up
in a couple weeks, the 23rd and 30th of August!
Obviously I didn’t plan to be away for the last 2 weeks - things happen
to people, one of my favorite phrases in life - things happen, unanticipated,
unplanned, and throw normal things into crisis and change. An infection I was
treating suddenly took a turn, and my body’s response to the infection took a
turn, and there I was in the hospital and even the ICU for a few days. Whew!
It happened
to Joseph, favored son from a favored wide, the last & youngest son of
Jacob, of whom we’ve been reading in our Hebrew Scriptures the last month. Jacob the trickster, whose wrestling with God
gave him the new name of Israel - Isra-el - one who wrestles with God. And, of course, the names of the large group
of ancestors known as Israelites, and even in our day, the name of a
middle-eastern nation, Israel. Joseph’s
brothers resent him, as the favored and youngest; and in the text we read
today, when dad sends Joseph out to take his brothers some food, they decide
they’ve had enough of Joseph and think about killing him and blaming it on wild animals. Brother Reuben succeeds in mitigating it a
bit, so they just throw him in a pit with no water - which probably will result
in Joseph’s death unless someone finds him - but at least they won’t have done
murder with their hands…..Then a caravan or merchants on the way to Egypt is
sighted, so they pull Joseph up and sell him, make some bucks. Whatever, Joseph is out of their life.
Imagine
being Joseph - things happen to people indeed!
He’s been a rather self-assured young man, he’s had some dreams that
seem to mean folks will bow down to him someday, so he might be rather pompous
about it...who knows. Imagine that Dad
sends you out with some food to where the older brothers are watching herds,
and suddenly your special coat is stripped off you, and your life is in danger.
Your brothers’ hatred of you rises up and gets acted out. Then, when you are despairing of your life,
suddenly you are hauled up and out of the pit and given to merchants as a slave
to sell in a foreign country. What a
crisis in Joseph’s life indeed! One day
a favored son who gets special presents from Dad, the next day marching with
slavers to who knows what.
Joseph’s
story goes on, and we might remember it from Sunday School. We’ll be reading some of that story over the next
weeks. Lots of changes happen to Joseph,
but it seems his faith in God endures, and he ends up, yes, in a position where
he actually saves his whole family.
Years later, of course.
In our text
from the gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ followers are suddenly in a crisis -
crossing the sea of Galilee, they are suddenly in a squall and being battered
by wind and waves - and Jesus is not there.
Jesus had stayed behind to pray, and would be joining them later - if
they make it, that is! Jesus further freaks them out by walking on the stormy
water to get to them - and when he gets in the boat, the storm calms. They are not really without Jesus.
These seem
like good Scriptures for us to ponder with all the changes flying around us,
largely due to the covid virus. It looks
like there are still a lot of adjustments to a new way of life - things are
going to be different for the foreseeable future. We’re having to let go of our hopes that
things will go back to “normal”... We’re unsure of how the virus is going to be
controlled, and how school and work will go, how the economy will go, how
racial issues will go, how the election will go…..there’s a lot to worry us and
raise our anxiety as the situation changes so rapidly. We can feel for Joseph; we can feel for
Jesus’ followers in their small boat battling the huge storm outside.
Where is God when these kinds of
crises happen? Where is God when
unanticipated and unplanned things happen, and our plans are turned upside
down? Where is God when things outside
our control upend everything, and we feel alone in a little boat on a wild sea,
or we find ourselves being taken to a new country and not treated well? When the skills and things we know how to do
to cope, suddenly don’t work, or are not effective?
We might feel abandoned by God, or
let down or angry, because we were not spared or protected. We prayed, we attended church, we cared for
others, we gave offerings - maybe we expected God to make everything okay for us,
protect us, spare us, because we were doing the right things. But it didn’t happen - things happened to us.
Perhaps our old way of understanding faith is challenged.
I think perhaps that’s what’s going
on in folks who say it's okay to not wear masks, because God will take care of
them - that to wear a mask means we fear God won’t protect us, and is a lack of
faith. They can’t seem to deal with the
reality of the situation because they insist on the way they’ve thought of God
as protecting them from earthly things - that’s what faith means to them, and
they won’t move past that.
If that’s the way faith has seemed
to work in our minds, it’s a difficult challenge to deal with the reality of a
pandemic virus that can infect and kill believers in God, as well and easily as
it infects and kills anyone.
These are the kinds of crises that
make us wrestle with God as Jacob/Israel did.
Is God at fault? Has God let us
down? Abandoned us? Or might it be that our understanding of God
and faith was too limited, too small, and mistaken? That we made assumptions about faith and God
and misunderstood? So then, what IS the
right way to walk in faith and trust?
What DOES faith mean?
Faith in God doesn’t make human life
and human ills not happen to us - that isn’t what being in the body of Christ
means. We’re humans, and things will
happen to us, things in common with all humans.
We can get cancer; we can have a child who is an alcoholic; we might
lose our job or be mistreated by a boss or cheated on by a spouse. If the water is polluted, we as well as all
humans take in that pollution and our bodies suffer. If a hurricane knocks the power out, our
power goes out, too. If some strange
virus jumps over the animal to human border, we are part of that humanity. If our national economy tanks, our own
finances take a dive, too. If the way of
life we’ve assumed works well for us is revealed as not working well for people
of color, and they rise up in anger, that’s our reality, too. We live on earth.
And on earth is where God works,
here and now. Jesus walks through the
storm to be with us. God loves us, and
will always be with us. Nothing can
separate us from God - not grief, nor covid,
nor loss, nor betrayal, nor illness, nor anything! God is with us when things happen to us -
we’re not spared any human ills, but God walks through it with us - we are not
alone. We can persevere with God in us, among us, with us - we can find
creative responses, we can endure and hold onto God’s truth. We can adapt as needed, we can overcome.
As a pastor, I've talked with people
who have left churches because they prayed for their dad but he died. Or that
some other prayed wasn’t answered like they wanted - they prayed diligently,
too, and were trying to live according to what the church taught them. But they couldn’t get past the feeling that
God let them down - somehow they couldn’t make that turn to say, “Maybe it’s me
that has misunderstood.” They wouldn’t
wrestle; they were too angry.
Jacob/Israel said to that man he
wrestled with, “I will not let you go until you bless me!” He hung in there
with God, insisting on working it out.
And God hung in there with him, too, and didn’t just leave and say, “Too
bad!” Job hung in there with God, even
with his massive losses and grief that he longed to understand. Joseph evidently hung in there with what he
knew of God, and was able to say years later, “You meant it for evil, but God
used it for good.” Jesus’ followers learned to hang in there, too, even trying
to walk on water like Jesus did - Peter managed a few steps before he looked
too much at the storm.
So something has happened to us
people right now - it doesn’t mean God is punishing us, or God has left us or
anything like that - God still loves us, God still is with us. The truths of
faith are sure, and God will walk with us through these storms. Yes, we wear our masks, wash our hands, and
stay a certain distance away as ways to mitigate the spread of this thing. But our call to faith is still true, our call
to mission is still true, our compassion for the “least of these” as the Bible
puts it, is still true. We are still
Christ’s church, we still gather for worship.
We still love one another. We
still care for our whole community and our country… and our world. God walks with us and makes us strong even if
things happen to us. AMEN.
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