8 Pentecost A – August 7, 2011

8 Pentecost A – August 7, 2011

Genesis 37: 1-28                  Psalm 85: 8-13        

Romans 10: 5-15                  Matthew 14: 22-33

Grace and peace to you from God our Creator, from Jesus our Redeemer, and from the Holy Spirit, our Comforter and Advocate.  Amen.

How many of you remember what dream you had when you were young?  What did you want to be when you grew up? What did you want to do?  Where did you want to travel?  Where would you go?  I must tell you that as a child it was never my dream to be a pastor because I grew up in a faith tradition that did not value men and women equally, so I never knew that God could use both genders in this way.  What I wanted to be was a lawyer, a courtroom attorney, arguing my cases before judge and jury and working for justice.  Instead I am a pastor.  I wonder if there’s a connection?

What did you want to be?  Are you willing to share that dream with us?  Just say it out loud…

In our reading from Genesis today we heard the story of Joseph…that would be Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, not Joseph your wife is going to bear the Son of God.  At any rate, Joseph is a young man, and his father’s favorite son, because, we are told, his father loved this particular wife more than any of his other wives.  So, you can see how the stage would be set already for some sibling rivalry.  In addition, Joseph tattles on his brothers to his father Jacob, or Israel.  Then, he has a dream, two dreams actually, in which his brothers end up bowing down to him.  And the text says his brothers hated him all the more.

It’s no wonder then that they end up conspiring to kill him.  It is only because the eldest brother, Reuben steps in, that rather than killing him, they first throw him into a pit, and later sell him into slavery.  So he was taken to Egypt as a slave.

This is a very sad story, indeed.  A gifted young dreamer, favored child of Israel, is sold away to a bunch of Ishmaelites, never to be heard from again.  Or so they thought.

I wonder what Joseph thought about his dream when he was down in the pit, or when he was being carried away as a slave?  In his day, dreams were considered to be one of the ways that God spoke to God’s people and many people today still feel led by God through their dreams.  Clearly Joseph’s dreams were not about Joseph being a slave or being at the bottom of a pit.  His dreams were about being in a position of authority.  What had happened to his dreams?

Let me ask you something, what happened to your dream?  To my dream?  Is there a dream that you had for yourself or your life that did not come to pass?  Why is that?  Why wasn’t I ever a famous courtroom attorney?

I think often times our dreams vanish because life happens.  Like Joseph, we begin to pursue our dream and life chases after us, and we find ourselves in a pit.  Anybody else ever been in a pit?  Life gets very hard.  We are told that we aren’t qualified enough to pursue our dream, or we are the wrong gender, or the wrong race or the wrong class.  The pit is like a glass ceiling or a closet that says “Don’t ask! Don’t tell!”  The pit is about the loss of a job or a relationship or a scholarship.  Or maybe when we’re in the pit we start to believe that we didn’t deserve to have our dreams in the first place, or that the dreams were just pipe dreams.  We begin to wonder if perhaps, now that we’re in the pit, we shouldn’t have shared our dreams with anyone else, much less God.  After all, it would have been very easy for Joseph to determine that the dreams he had were wrong.  That the pit is what God had planned for Joseph all along.

But Joseph’s story doesn’t end in the pit and neither does ours.  There’s something in our dreams and in our dreaming that God wants us to do.  And this is true both as individuals and  as communities of believers.  There are things we are dreaming about that God wants us, as a congregation, to do as well.

What are our ministry dreams for Luther Memorial?  I can assure you that no one dreams of balanced budgets, except perhaps our Treasurer.  And besides that, the budget is balanced, thanks to your faithful stewardship.  So, dreamers, this is the time to imagine, to dream, what it is that God is calling us to be about in ministry.

Your church council has been doing just this…dreaming….and it’s fascinating that we are reluctant dreamers.  Maybe we feel that we don’t deserve to dream or we don’t have what we need to make those dreams happen, but friends…imagine how Joseph must have felt in a pit?  Or carried off in shackles as a slave?  Could it have been something like the way you felt when you thought that Luther Memorial would no longer be here, would no longer be at the corner of 130th and Greenwood?  And yet, look now, what God has done!  Look at the dreams….a Giving Garden, a feeding program for people with no homes, a shelter for homeless women and their children, new conversation with Broadview-Thomsen School and with Viewlands School. Many, many new people and ministries in our midst!  People in this neighborhood, if they know nothing else of God, know that this place…so visible to them and so alive…is doing God’s work.  Oh, we might have thought we were in the pit, but God knew better.

Just as this congregation has a dream that God wants us to live into, so do each one of us.  It’s easy to think that when our lives are in the pits or we’ve stumbled or we’ve taken a wrong turn that the dream we thought we had isn’t really ours.  But the story of Joseph tells us that the dream is true, as long as we are looking to God first.

Here’s what happens later in Joseph’s story.  Joseph gets carried off to Egypt where he becomes a slave to Potipher’s wife who tries to frame him for seducing her, so he is thrown in jail.  There he is able to interpret dreams for a butler and a baker who work for Pharaoh  When Pharaoh starts having dreams that need interpreting, he hears about Joseph and sends for him.  Eventually Joseph becomes a wise and trusted advisor to Pharaoh and helps him save his nation from famine.  Imagine, if Joseph had not been thrown in a pit and sold into slavery, then thrown into jail later… an entire nation would have perished.

Later, Joseph’s brothers, only knowing that Pharaoh has large storehouses of food available find themselves bowing down before Pharaoh’s trusted advisor, not knowing that he is their brother.  Joseph could have turned them away.  He could have repaid evil for evil…an eye for an eye until everyone is blind.  But Joseph showed mercy on them, giving them food, and embracing them as his family.

You see,  Joseph’s gifts were used by God.  Joseph, with all of his difficulty in life had gifts for leadership and perseverance.  And it was those gifts that saved a nation.  Joseph also had the capacity for mercy and forgiveness.  So, when a leader needed to be raised up at a crucial moment in history, it was a leader named Joseph, who could lead in ways that were just and merciful.  The dream was true after all.

Each one of us has a unique gift, a calling and a purpose in this world.  Each of us has a way that we are to live in the world that shows God’s love, mercy, and grace.  These are not gifts like the gift of being a lawyer or a famous author or even a dream interpreter.  These are, St. Paul tells us, gifts of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.  These are the gifts that will help us accomplish all that we dream of, all that we know God has called us to be and do.  The same is true for us as a community of faith.  When we act with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self control we will be much better equipped to live out God’s call to us than we will if we re-act…if our actions are self centered, and not focused on loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.

Sisters and brothers, don’t give up on your dreams, don’t give up on our dreams, for they contain within them the very call of God on our lives.  Life will be difficult sometimes and we will find ourselves in all sorts of pits, but God is faithful…to Joseph, to his brothers, and to us.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

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