Paul's Labor Day Sermon

Paul’s Labor Day Sermon
Romans 12:9-21; Exodus 3:1-15; Matthew 16:21-28

A person does not read Paul once. A person does not read Paul twice. A person does not read Paul three times. However many times a person reads Paul, that person needs to read Paul at least once more, and once more after that, and once more after that. It is not a question of memorizing Paul. That’s not the solution to Paul. Paul’s writing is so compact, so densely written that a reader has to parse every word, every adjoining pair of words, every phrase, every clause, before approaching each sentence, before addressing each paragraph.

Romans chapter 12 is a case in point. Paul has spent eleven chapters assuring the Roman believers that God’s justifying grace is extended to Jews and Gentiles alike. It has been like a proclamation: whereas, whereas, whereas. Chapter begins the great “Therefore....” Now Paul lists the implications of God’s grace for the way we live our lives as individual believers and as Christ communities.

Paul has hitherto been restrained and now he lets loose. Today’s reading is merely thirteen verses, yet those verses contain 23 separate imperatives. And each one, brief as each may be, could unpack into 23 full-length sermons. You no more want to sit through all those sermons than I want to write them.

You don’t need to recall all was said in last week’s sermon on the first eight verses of Romans 12, but let’s begin where the chapter begins:

So, brothers and sisters, because of God’s mercies, I encourage you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice that is holy and pleasing to God. This is your appropriate priestly service.
This is the topic sentence for everything that follows. All the injunctions and imperatives that flow in today’s thirteen verse reading find their grounding in that sweeping “therefore” declaration, “This is your appropriate priestly service,” “This is your right and proper worship.” Paul declares that to live in Christ is to worship 24-7.

Today’s reading, with all its imperatives, is Paul’s Labor Day sermon. This sermon was written long before the Knights of Labor were formed in 1869; long before Samuel L. Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor in Columbus, Ohio in May 1886; long before John L. Lewis formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1935; long before the two organizations joined in 1955. Paul was not addressing workers’ training, safety, hours, benefits, salaries, or seniority. Paul was speaking to the work of living a life of faith in any circumstance.

Every job posting has a description of the position. Verse nine provides the description for the work of being a Christian: Love should be shown without pretending. Love is to be genuine, a self-sacrificial love, a love that cares for the well-being of others. All the gifts that are exercised by the Christ-believer or in the assembly of believers should be expressed in this love. This love is the most accurate indicator of spiritual health in the body of Christ.

From this follows a list of how this love is to be lived out:

• Hate evil, and hold on to what is good. 
• Love each other like the members of your family. 
• Be the best at showing honor to each other. 
• Don’t hesitate to be enthusiastic
• Be on fire in the Spirit as you serve the Lord!
• Be happy in your hope, 
• Stand your ground when you’re in trouble, 
• Devote yourselves to prayer. 
• Contribute to the needs of God’s people, 
• Welcome strangers into your home. 

If some of this sounds familiar, it is because Paul has already offered a similar list in chapter thirteen of the First Corinthian letter.

This job description for the working Christian aims at developing a thriving team member ethos. Believers cannot effectively serve the cause of Christ if they are self-centered, bickering, vindictive, aggressive, spiteful, or apathetic. Believers are to honor each other, recognizing that each one, unique as he or she is, bears the stamp of God’s creative genius.

Most people know how to pretend to love others—how to speak kindly, avoid hurting their feelings, and appear to take an interest in them. We may even be skilled in pretending to feel moved with compassion when we hear of others’ needs, or to become indignant when we learn of injustice. But God calls us to real and sincere love that goes far beyond politeness. Sincere love requires concentration and effort. It means helping others become better people. It demands our time, money, and personal involvement. No individual has the capacity to express love to a whole community, but the community of Christ can.

The next three verses list some special qualifications. Every job has skills which are required as well as skills which are desired:

• Bless people who harass you—bless and don’t curse them. 
• Be happy with those who are happy, and cry with those who are crying. 
• Consider everyone as equal, and don’t think that you’re better than anyone else. 
• Associate with people who have no status.
• Don’t think that you’re so smart.

These are special skills which Paul believes are essential for the community of Christ to operate effectively.

Paul focused on both the internal working of the community as well as how the community of Christ was going to fit into the larger community. Christians were few in number. They needed to represent Christ well in order to show themselves as people with whom not-yet-Christians would want to associate and to become acquainted with the power of the message of grace.

By doing this, believers would be obeying Christ’s words in the Sermon on the Mount, “Love your enemies and pray for those who harass you” (Matthew 5:44) and from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

Every job description lists responsibilities and required and desired skills. It also will describe how the job performance will be evaluated. The last five verses describe the criteria which will be used for evaluation:

• Don’t pay back anyone for their evil actions with evil actions
• Show respect for what everyone else believes is good. 
• To the best of your ability, live at peace with all people. 
• Don’t try to get revenge for yourselves, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath. 
• If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him a drink, thus you will pile burning coals of fire upon his head. 
• Don’t be defeated by evil, but defeat evil with good.

It is obvious that the work of being a Christian is difficult, unnerving, potentially confrontational, and counter-cultural. People who haven’t yet welcomed Christ into their lives will be uncomfortable with the ease, the grace, the simple unflappable love with which believers go about their work. Christians don’t live by the dog-eat-dog, eye-for-an-eye rules of the world, but by the rules of God’s realm that spurns power for authenticity and builds charity rather than division. Christian workers opt out of the coercion and violence that are so popular. As Paul said in the chapter’s opening charge:

Don’t be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you can figure out what God’s will is—what is good and pleasing and mature.
That is the message which Paul preaches for Labor Day, for any day, for every day.

How does the believer respond to that? Here is one response, offered by Brian McLaren:

“Please de-baptize me,” she said.
The priest’s face crumpled.
“My parents tell me you did it,” she said.
“But I was not consulted. So
Now, undo it.”
The priest’s eyes asked why.
“If it were just about belonging to
This religion and being forgiven,
Then I would stay. If it were just
About believing
This list of doctrines and upholding
This list of rituals,
I’d be OK. But
Your sermon Sunday made
It clear it’s
About more. More
Than I bargained for. So, please,
De-baptize me.”
The priest looked down, said
Nothing. She continued:
“You said baptism sends
Me into the
World to
Love enemies. I don’t. Nor
Do I plan to. You said it means
Being willing to stand
Against the flow. I like the flow.
You described it like rethinking
Everything, like joining a
Movement. But
I’m not rethinking or moving anywhere.
So un-baptize me. Please.”
The priest began to weep. Soon
Great sobs rose from his deepest heart.
He took off his glasses, blew his nose, took
Three tissues to dry his eyes.
“These are tears of joy,” he said.
“I think you
Are the first person who ever
Truly listened or understood.”
“So,” she said,
“Will you? Please?”(1)

(1) Brian D. McLaren, posted on Facebook, August 31, 2014.
General Resources: Christopher R. Hutson, “Romans 12:1-9: Exegetical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year A, vol. 4, pp15-19; Life Application Bible Commentary, Romans 12:9-21.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Needed: Free Flow Spirit

Needed: Free Flow Spirit
Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20

I know that some of you follow the suggested daily Bible readings from the Mission Yearbook of Prayer. The daily epistle readings recently started in the Book of Acts. Just this week the readings reached chapter nine where Saul has his eye-blinding and mind-boggling experience of the risen Lord Jesus on his way to Damascus where he was going to roundup and deport to Jerusalem any believers that he found. Then God dispatched a man named Ananias to Judas’ house on Straight Street to heal Saul’s sight and begin his journey of faith as an apostle of the risen Lord.

There is nothing like a new believer. All of the energy and venom that had motivated Saul now converted him into a powerful, dauntless, irrepressible advocate and salesman for Jesus. He couldn’t do anything other than change his name, because he was a changed man. Paul was on fire to preach the good news of the gracious lordship of God expressed in Jesus Christ. That is nowhere more evident than in the extended letter that we know as addressed to the Romans.

Volumes and volumes have been written about the Romans letter by some of the most renowned theologians of the church across the centuries. Yet for all the words derived from the letter’s sixteen chapters, very little is known about the letter’s actual provenance. We don’t really know when Paul wrote it, or where he was when he wrote it. Nor do we know just what Paul knew about the situation among Christians in Rome. And we know very little about the church in Rome, other than the fact that Paul didn’t start it like he did many of those in Asia Minor – Turkey today – and in Greece. Since we don’t know how the church started, we don’t have much knowledge about the peculiarities of their faith in Christ. All we know is that Paul wanted to go to Rome and meet these fellow believers.

As Betsy Ensign-George pointed out in yesterday’s presentation on the forthcoming Presbyterian Women’s study of the 2 Corinthians letter, in some parts of the church the writings of Paul have greater influence than the gospels. In a sense, Paul is perhaps the earliest trained theologian of Christian doctrine. He studied with those who had been closest to Jesus. He takes all that learning and expounds and expands it. He understands that God is Lord over the whole of created reality. Therefore his reflections on that lordship encompass the full range of human problems. Romans is rife with that approach. Paul Achtemeier says that Paul deals with problems as contemporary as tomorrow’s newspaper and that they are problems as global as the headlines and as intimate as those discussed in “Dear Abby.”(1) Paul is passionate about his belief not only for himself but also for his Jewish kith and kin, as well as people with no Jewish heritage.

Was Paul writing at leisure during some downtime on one of his journeys or between journeys? Or was Paul writing during his initial imprisonment in Caesarea? The passion and intensity of his writing suggests the latter.

Professor N. T. Wright leans toward a provenance of prison and fairly good knowledge of the situation in Rome. Although the details are murky, there is sufficient evidence that a large portion of Rome’s Jewish population was forced to leave the city in the late 40s of the common era, about fifteen years after Christ’s resurrection. This was probably because of rioting that may have resulted from early Christian preaching in the Jewish community. The expulsion edict came from Emperor Claudius. He died in year 54 and was succeeded by the infamous Nero, who rescinded Claudius’ decrees, making it possible for Jews to return to Rome.(2) That would seem to be the backdrop for Paul’s writing.

Professor Eleazar S. Fernandez calls the situation in Rome a confessional situation or status confessionis.(3) This is “the state, or condition, of the Church, the society, the world, in which the Church must stand by and stand up: stand by her confession and stand up for the authority of the Word of God that she confesses.”(4) Paul senses that this is the situation in Rome. And indeed it is his own situation. This is the same kind of situation that Martin Luther found himself in as he was censured by the 16th century papal authorities; “Here I stand, I can do nothing else.” Or the Confessing Church in Germany in 1934, whose “Barmen Declaration” avowed:

“Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.”

Imperial Rome was the empire in Paul’s time. It claimed devotion and demanded sacrifice. This was not only offensive to Jews following the Mosaic Law – “I am the LORD your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You must have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:2-3). It was even more offensive to Christians who believed that Christ was the Word of God in flesh and blood.

Our times are also imperial, though in a different way. The empire of our time is much more subtle and insidious. We live in a global market economy, which is beneficial, but at a cost. But more than that we live in a market society where the 1% – despite all the good many of them do – get richer at the expense of the comparatively poor, the poorer, and the most poor. Our idol is the irrepressible need for more and more. Anything that separates us from God – or stands in the place of God – is an idol.

Paul called the Roman believers of whose plight he had heard to present themselves as a “living sacrifice that is holy and pleasing to God.” He tells them, “This is your appropriate priestly service.” Eugene Peterson in The Message puts it this way:

“Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out.” (Romans 12:1-2)

No matter what culture Christians find themselves in, we are to offer our whole being – head, heart, bankbook, Facebook profile – as a daily “living” sacrifice.

That’s one reason we come to the Lord’s Table so often. It reminds us that only as we allow Christ to live in us and through us that we may make our strong, yet humble, confession declaring God ruler of all we have, all we are, all we imagine ourselves to be, all we dream and hope for.

Every day is a confessional situation. It may not be literally life and death, as it has been for Christians in Mosul, Iraq, or for churches trying display crosses in Chinese cities, or for believers in India, Indonesia, South Sudan, or whatever location will be in tomorrow’s news. Believers – you and I in our daily lives – must make our confessions about who our Lord and Savior is.

As a fire needs oxygen to burn, the church – and every individual believer – needs the free flow of the precious Holy Spirit to inflame faith in flesh and sinews and synapses. If we are not inspired by the Spirit, we shall surely expire. Underneath Paul’s words is the prayer of the early church: “Come, Holy Spirit.”

May it be so. Amen.

(1) Paul Achtemeier, Romans (Interpretation: a Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching) (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), p. 1.
(2) N. T. Wright, “Romans,” The New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), Vol X, p. 406
(3) Eleazar S. Fernandez, “Romans 12:1-8: Theological Perspective, Feasting on the Word, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), Year A, vol. 3, p. 376.
(4) Harold O. J. Brown, http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=12-03-036-f


Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com 
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Not Too Big to Learn

Not Too Big to Learn
Matthew 15:10-28; Genesis 45:1-15; Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32

There are lots of passages in scripture that offend readers. Today’s gospel reading has one of most offensive passages. In the first part of the reading we cheer for Jesus. We like it when the bad guys, in this case the Pharisees, get put in their place by Jesus’ actions or words. But the second half of the reading always jars us. We find Jesus’ attitude and language shocking. Nice Jesus doesn’t talk to people in that way. It goes against the grain of nearly every story about Jesus. It is just so uncharacteristic of Jesus.

Yet the story is an appropriate one for Jesus and for us. Matthew has carefully crafted his narrative to bring several points to his readers through the combining of these two readings. The first part of the reading is about people who are socially accepted who emphasize external differences and miss matters of the heart. In the second incident a woman who is not socially accepted breaks through external differences to claim God’s mercy. In the first situation Jesus has all the right words to teach his hearers about God’s grace, but in the second, it is the woman who has the right words which alter the way Jesus responds to her need.

Every time this reading comes around in the lectionary cycle there are discussions in Internet sermon groups about whether or not Jesus is insensitive or even demeaning towards this woman. After all, on other occasions he is quite gracious to both men and women who are not Jewish. He recognizes the dignity of the woman at the well, the faith of Roman military officer, the thankfulness of the Gentile leper who returns after his healing, and the responsiveness of Zacchaeus. But in this scene he comes across as abusive.

In another aspect, Jesus seems to be keeping on task. When he sent the disciples out earlier he told them not to go to the Gentiles. He reaffirms that task as he initially rebuffs the woman’s persistent request, “I’ve been sent only to the lost sheep, the people of Israel.”  This is not a story that sets up a mission campaign to the Gentiles, like some Billy Graham crusade. It is a story about a Gentile woman taking the initiative to encounter Jesus, much like the woman with the hemorrhage who seeks to touch his coattails.

If Jesus isn’t being snotty with the woman, then he comes off as inept or wrong, something which is equally contrary to our usual picture of Jesus.

Jesus is the consummate teacher. The situation doesn’t matter. He is always in teaching mode. These two incidents, the reaction of the Pharisees and the request of the Gentile woman, are no different.

“Don’t you know that everything that goes into the mouth enters the stomach and goes out into the sewer?” The sewer carries away all the things that we put into our bodies that may not be very good for them. Or in the case of the highly observant Jews of Jesus’s day, any foods that are thought to be ritually unclean. Or, heaven forbid, failing to wash your hands before eating. You and I know what happens that when we eat things that disagree with us. Just forward our mail to the necessary room. In time everything gets flushed and we get back to being normal.

Unfortunately what comes out of our mouths doesn’t have the same result. Our careless words, our spiteful and hate-filled words, our lies, our abusive behavior of other human beings, our evil are harmful and do not pass away.

A popular children’s moment about this topic has the leader emptying a tube of toothpaste and asking the children if they can get the paste back in the tube. Another even messier demonstration is to empty a feather pillow outdoors in a breeze and have them try to get all the feathers back. It’s not going to happen.

Jesus uses the encounter with the Gentile woman as a teachable moment. He does so not by lecturing but by giving us an example of learning, a laboratory experience of growing in faith. His encounters with the religious establishment frequently ended with the spiritual know-it-alls reprimanding Jesus for attempting to tell them about God. As Jesus encounters the Gentile woman seeking mercy and healing for her daughter, Jesus models the grace of learning, the grace of experiencing that God’s way and will is always bigger than we want to allow.

The woman shouted, “Show me mercy!” In our English that appears to be a noun. But in Matthew’s Greek it is a verb, the same verb that describes the mercy that the merciful receive in the Beatitudes. She seeks to benefit from the breadth of God’s ruling activity. Added to that, when she pleads, “Help me,” she is echoing Peter’s plea when he was sinking in his attempt to walk on water. Both the woman and Peter want to experience the reality of God’s ruling activity in Jesus’ actions.

As the woman beseeches Jesus she uses what we would assume are key words about him, “Lord,” which could simply be “sir,” and “Son of David,” a title for Jesus favored by Matthew. But Jesus doesn’t respond to either title.

The woman violates every sense of the boundaries that were expected in those days – her ethnicity, her gender, her heritage, her religion, and even the concept of demon possession. In the grand scheme of Matthew’s approach to telling the good news of Jesus Christ, the woman believes that she and her daughter are people who should benefit from the in-breaking of God’s kingdom, God’s ruling activity announced in and through the personal presence of Jesus. So she is willing to ignore social protocol. In doing so, she dramatically reveals the depth of her faith. Thus she is very much like the Roman military officer who sees faith in terms of chain of command.

The woman believes that she and her daughter should receive mercy from the active engagement of God with creation. This is what Jesus calls faith. This is what Jesus elicits from her in the same way that a well-trained teacher enables a student to think out the problem-solving steps and arrive at the solution. Jesus models good faith formation practice as he encourages the woman to speak her faith. Matthew’s Jesus is big enough not to appear to be ashamed to learn.

Learning is a struggle. And it gets harder all the time. We are sometimes hampered by declining eyesight and hearing. Sometimes it just that the thought processes don’t react as fast as they once did. And sometimes, like some of the Pharisees that Jesus encountered, we don’t want to have opinions challenged by facts or by new information. Yet Jesus models for us the reality that we must always be ready to enlarge our vision of God’s activity. Any time we think that God can’t or won’t do something, we set ourselves up for an awakening that won’t be comfortable.

We are used to operating on our own. In the world of computing, engineers have discovered that there are limits to what single super-computer can do. But to their surprise, they have found that hundreds and thousands of small computers working in parallel networks can solve tremendous mathematical problems which would bog down a single large computer.

In the matter of faith, it takes the sum of all of our spiritual capacity as a community of faith to even begin to consider the breadth and depth of God’s activity. And more than likely, God’s activity won’t be in the mundane and everyday. It will be in the oddball, off-the-wall activity of people who are at the margins of life, who live beyond the pale of what so many of us think as acceptable. This is because God is always trying to teach us that God’s grace knows no bounds and is God’s business, not ours.

Jesus invites us to be faithfully big enough to be constantly learning beyond the edges of our faith.

Let us pray.

Teacher par excellence, model for us ways in which we may learn more readily your ways and means of grace. Show us that redemption is not a matter of rote memorization. Instill in us an irrepressible native curiosity for kingdom living and an effervescent sharing of the gospel. Hear our prayer, Jesus, our teacher and master. Amen.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Defensive Pessimism

Defensive Pessimism
Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28; Romans 10:5-15; Matthew 14:22-33

The Grammy Awards happen every February. There are awards for a wide variety of musical styles and performance combinations: Pop, Rock, Alternative, R & B, Rap, Country, Gospel, New Age, Jazz, Classical, TV and Film. In 2002, the album of the year was the soundtrack from the film O Brother, Where Art Thou. It starred George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson as three escaped convicts in the 1930s deep South. The soundtrack included many traditional southern mountain songs, including this one:

Keep on the sunny side,
Always on the sunny side,
Keep on the sunny side of life.
It will help us every day,
It will brighten all the way,
If we’ll keep on the sunny side of life.

A lot of traditional Appalachian Mountain music deals with the notion that people live in this world which is filled with all manner of hardship and the only hope is the future kingdom of God’s gracious goodness – the promised land of eternity. So a person needs to try to keep on the sunny side in order to survive until glory arrives.

Most of us have grown up with the power of positive thinking. We've been warned about negative outlooks and what popular psychologists call “catastrophizing.” To have a successful outcome when facing a problem, we're told that we need to avoid the bad and focus on the good. “Keep on the sunny side,” insists the pop psychology and self-help movement.

But that may not necessarily be the case, according to Julie Norem, author of a highly counter-intuitive book called The Positive Power of Negative Thinking. Sunny, upbeat strategies don’t always work. In fact, they may make some people more nervous than ever.

For some folks, the only thing that can bring a sense of calm is to directly contemplate negative outcomes. This deliberate, structured focus on dark contingencies is called “defensive pessimism.” It is usually described as “Murphy’s Law,” which is, “Anything that can possibly go wrong, will.”

Norem says that there are three steps to work through an anxiety-producing task. First, begin with lower expectations, that is, expect something to wrong.

Second, imagine in detail all the ways in which the task could go awry. These could even be ranked in likelihood.

Third, map out ways to avert each potential catastrophe and be prepared to meet any that arise.

In three easy steps you can move from pessimistic preparations to optimistic outcomes.(1)

There can be positive power in negative thinking. Just ask Joseph. His is one of the longest stories in scripture, running nearly 1/4 of Genesis. We got just the opening scene in today’s reading. The lectionary skips over much of the middle of the story and moves to the ending next week.

Joseph is a happy-go-lucky and optimistic nice guy dreamer. His attitude annoys his ten older brothers, so much that they conspire to kill him by throwing him into a pit. One cooler head among the brothers prevails and at the sight of some merchants headed for Egypt, they sell him into slavery. “Come on, let’s . . . not harm him because he’s our brother; he’s family.”

Down into the pit for death and then up again to life. That was Joseph’s lot. He got a decent slave job working for a mid-level manager in Pharaoh’s household. But the manager’s wife got the hots for him. When he refused her advances, she accused him of coming on to her. Of course it was her word against his, so he wound up in prison.

In prison he was a likable fellow and made friends with a couple of Pharaoh’s staff members with whom Pharaoh had fallen out. He interpreted their dreams: one would regain his position, the other would not. When that happened, the surviving steward forgot about Joseph, leaving him to languish in prison.

Finally when none of Pharaoh’s counselors could interpret Pharaoh’s dreams, the wine steward finally remembered Joseph. Joseph was released and successfully interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams about seven years of bountiful harvests and seven years of poor harvests. Pharaoh appointed the former slave and prisoner Joseph to oversee the entire program of stockpiling the abundant harvests and distributing them during the lean years. Joseph had been down and now he was up, way up as second in power in Egypt.

During the years of famine, his brothers traveled to Egypt to buy grain. Joseph recognized them and toyed with them. First he required one brother to stay in prison and made them bring their youngest brother on the next visit. He secretly  returned their money in their sacks. On the next visit he had a special cup hidden in Benjamin’s sack and then sent after them to arrest them for theft. Then Joseph finally revealed himself to them. We will get there next week.

Because we know the whole story, we know that God was with Joseph. Nevertheless, to get through these experiences, Joseph must have gone through an attitude adjustment. His dreamy, positive-thinking optimism didn’t mesh with slavery. If Joseph had used defensive pessimism as a strategy, what would he have said to himself in his mental rehearsal?

• I’ll never see my family again – so I better embrace my new friends. 
• I’m going to be eating couscous for the rest of my life – I better learn to like it. 
• I will probably be tempted to abandon my faith and principles – I better develop a strong sense of ethics and morality. 
• I have no marketable skills to survive – I better study hard and prepare for what lies ahead. 
• My life is over as I know it – I better think about how to reinvent myself. 

This seems to be a deliberate, structured focus on dark contingencies. It takes the negative experiences of life very seriously and refuses to sugarcoat some extremely bitter pills. But Joseph does more than simply contemplate negative outcomes – he also cooperates with God in the ongoing shaping of his story.

When Joseph was dragged down to Egypt, he remained faithful to the Lord, strong in the face of sexual temptation, courageous in prison and consistently discerning and wise in his dealings with Pharaoh. The result was that he became Pharaoh's right-hand man, the most powerful figure in the land of Egypt.

When he revealed himself to his brothers, they cowered in fear. But Joseph told them, “You planned something bad for me, but God produced something good from it, in order to save the lives of many people, just as he is doing today” (Genesis 50:20).

Our lives, like the life of Joseph, are filled with downs and ups, with pits of despair and apparent misfortune, with moments of success and elation. Neither lasts forever.

Jesus’ life was certainly filled with downs and ups, with rebuffs and acceptances, with death and ultimately resurrection life. He tried to train the disciples toward that end. Sometimes they got it, and sometimes they didn’t. The episode of Peter wanting to walk on water is one of those times.

We are used to thinking that Peter was supposed to keep his eyes on Jesus and so stay afloat. If we were meant to walk on water, Jesus would have said to the others, “Come on in, the water’s fine.” He didn’t. He pulled Peter out of the drink and put him back in the boat. Originally Jesus had sent the disciples in the boat. The way was hard going. Peter wanted the easy – optimistic – way out. “Let me walk on water, too.”

Canadian pastor Brian Donst says that the boat is out on the sea on a mission from Jesus.  As hard and slow as the going was, the disciples were called to steer the boat across the sea of change toward a new and different shore to reach yet other people with Jesus’ good news of the kingdom of God.

Brian Donst goes on to say that we really are not meant (or asked by God) to walk on water. And the boat we are in is not meant to stay quietly anchored in a safe haven. We will find security and salvation in the boat, but maybe only as we keep steering and rowing to whatever new place Jesus is wanting to go to with us.(2)

Optimism is fine, but defensive pessimism will keep us focused on the preparations we need to be able to be used by God wherever we are, wherever we are called to, whatever happens, whether it is the pit or the height. As the psalmist has said, wherever we go, God will be there. For that we can be truly thankful.

Let us pray.

Lord of depths and heights, God of good times and not-so-good times, Spirit of salvation, grant us faith-strength to keep focused on what you have called us to be and do, and fill us with wisdom to sense and prepare for hardships and hazards of life that might divert our attention from you. In the name of Jesus who came from heaven to earth to show us the way, from the earth to the cross our debt to pay, from the cross to the grave, from the grave to the sky, to be our glorious life. Amen.

(1) Cited in “Homiletics Online,” August 2002; http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/btl_display.asp?installment_id=3118.
(2) Brian Donst, http://food4fifty.blogspot.ca.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.