Creatio Ex Nihilo

Healthy Church: A See-Through Community

Have you ever tried to get a straight answer out of a politician?  A few years back, I approached a local official about our church using one of the town’s facilities.  To this day, I’m still not sure what his answer was.  It was one of those “well yes and no” deals.  Although mastering the ambiguity of “yes and no” may be a shrewd trait in politicians, in almost every other aspect of life, it is frustrating and sometimes even hurtful to encounter.

Is there anything worse than inviting someone to a party at your home and hearing the response,  “maybe if we’re not busy that day.”  In other words, “If nothing better comes up, rest assured, being last on my list, your party is the first place I’ll come.”  Really makes you feel good about a friendship, doesn’t it?  Are you coming?  Well, yes and no.

That behavior is exactly what the apostle Paul was accused of by church in Corinth.  He had told the Corinthians he would be visiting them twice, once on his way to Macedonia and once on his way back.  As it turns out he did neither.  From Paul’s response in this letter we can infer that the Corinthians accuse him of being duplicitous and deceitful - of saying yes when he really meant no.

Why is it of any concern to us, two thousand years later, that an early church planter cancelled two planned changed his travel plans?  What possible importance could such historical minutiae carry?  The actual details of why Paul cancelled his trip we’ll examine next week. However, the way in which Paul responds to these accusations can teach us plenty about how followers of Jesus are to behave not only within a healthy church, but also in all of our relationships. 

Healthy Church: Finding Comfort Outside Your Comfort Zone

Every home has a sacred object in it.  Like a tree a life I the Garden of Eden, each home has an area which is forbidden.  As a kid, you touch it at your own peril.  When I was in Middle School, I had a friend named Jerry.  Jerry’s house was a fun place to hang out.  His parents were pretty laid back compared to those of everyone else (they had HBO).  Except for one unbreakable rule.  When we were in Jerry’s den, no one was allowed to sit in his father’s reclining chair.  If any of us, or even Jerry sat in it, his mother would come running in, almost in a panic, “Don’t sit in your father’s chair!  Don’t sit in your father’s chair!” Even worse than sitting there, was moving the TV Guide that was strategically placed on the side table next to the Lay-Z-Boy.

At the time, having such devotion to a particular piece of furniture seemed silly.  It reminded me of Archie Bunker, and his now Smithsonian-enshrined chair. However, as I got older, I too fell victim to the lure of the comfy chair.  In our home, there once was a big green chair that I loved.  It was where I wrote all my papers when I was in seminary.  It was where I used to sit with the kids when they were little.  It was where I was sitting when I received the phone call that my father had died.  For a decade, that chair was a place of great comfort for me.   It was my comfort zone.  Eventually there came a day when Pam had to break some bad news to me.  After enduring the punctures and fluids of three kids and two dogs, the green chair would have to go.  But, I loved that chair.  It fit me perfectly. I was losing my comfort zone.

We all want to have a nice comfy place where we can retreat from the troubles of the world, rest and feel better.  So at first reading, the apostle Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 1 seem reassuring.  After all, hearing that when we suffer, it is so that God will comfort us and we in turn can be a source of comfort for others.  It all sounds so - well, comfortable. 

A Messy Life: God the Absentee Father?

It was shortly after his father died that my friend Scott and I met at a pub to talk.  Even though he was grieving the loss of his father, Scott felt a lot of anger toward him.  He harbored many resentments toward him and was haunted by unresolved arguments with him.  I asked Scott what sorts of things he was angry about and he was able to recount incidents from thirty years ago with stunning clarity.

Scott was a pretty good baseball player.  It had been his passion his whole life.  Yet it was also a source of pain for him, especially in regard to his father.  He remembered Little League games that his father had promised to attend. As a young boy, he would look into the bleachers, hoping to see him, but his father was seldom around.  As he moved up to high school, Scott became quite a good pitcher.  What hurt him most was the fact that, as he became a local baseball hero,  his father never came to see him pitch a single game.  It wasn’t just during the good games that he missed his father.  It was during the bad games as well, during the hard losses and disappointments.

“I feel like I’ll be carrying around this resentment the rest of my life,” Scott said depressingly.  “My father was never there when I needed him.”

Many of you may have had fathers who, due to a heavy workload or just plain indifference, never seemed to be there for you when we needed them.  Many of you in this room, who are fathers now, struggle to be a different kind of father.  You make the effort to attend every one of your child’s games or concerts.  You work hard to be involved in all the aspect of your kid’s lives.  The last thing you ever want to be called is an absentee father.

When we read the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis, it can seem like the tale of an absentee father - or two.  Joseph’s father, Jacob, sometimes referred to as Israel, does not play a large role in moving any of the plot forward.  He favors Joseph more than his other sons, even going so far as to give him a special ornamental coat.  But when the brothers become jealous, even going so far as to plot his murder, Jacob doesn’t bother to correct them, or stop their schemes against Joseph.  Instead Jacob seems to passively sit back and allow this evil to happen.  Surely, we wonder to ourselves, Jacob could have made the effort to get a little more involved in Joseph’s life.

A Messy Life: Getting Uneven

When I was growing up in the seventies, movie heroes were a complex lot.  Actually, they were more anti-heroes than they were heroes.  The kind of people you weren’t sure whether you should root for or not.  When you did, you felt slightly guilty.  Dirty Harry was a great example.  He perfectly encapsulated our frustration at the time with America’s legal system and guilty criminals perceived as getting off easy.  He did all the things we secretly wanted done to those degenrates.  With our ambivalence awakened, we simultaneously cheered him on and felt revulsion toward him as he doled out revenge.

Joseph would have made a perfect seventies anti-hero.  When we first meet him he is thoroughly unlikable and a behaves like a spoiled brat.  His jealous brothers throw him down a well and sell him into slavery in Egypt.  While there, he works his way up to being the number two man in the country.  He rebounds from all his bad fortune and overcomes the horrible things his family did to him.  So years later, when his brothers come groveling before him and don’t even recognize him, we imagine it’s the perfect time for Joseph to get his revenge.  With his brothers, bowed before him just as his dream predicted, we want Joseph to look down at them and with a Clint Eastwood squint say, “Go ahead.  Make my day!”

Like any good (or is it bad?) anti-hero, Joseph has a complex mixture of qualities that appeal to the best and worst in ourselves.  Last week, we explored his admirable traits - the way his avoidance of self-pity, adherence to his values and willingness to engage his new culture enabled him to thrive there.  He was able to fit in without selling out.   

But like us, Joseph’s life is messy.  Today we see his petty side.  Although in the past, he seemed to be able to keep his resentments and past hurts in check, having his brothers bowed down in front of him is too tempting to resist.

A Messy Life: Fitting In Without Selling Out

We’ve all had times in life when  everything changes suddenly.  Sometimes, it’s due to a bad turn of events.  Sometimes, it’s just the natural course of life.  For instance, you my have gone away to college and found yourself in an entirely new world. Or you may have changed jobs at one point in your career and discovered that your new company does business in a way very different from your old one.  When confronted with these changes, you have to decide how you were going to live your life in this new environment.   In both cases, you may find yourself facing moral or ethical challenges in which you have to choose how you will act.  You may find yourself in situations where your old sense of values is challenged.

When his brothers sold him into slavery in Egypt, Joseph faced the same situation.  He found himself working in the household of a powerful Egyptian named Potipher.  Yet Joseph is able to not only survive I his new surroundings, he thrives in them.   How is he able to do that?  At the risk of sounding like a cotemporary mega-church preacher, I think the story teaches us three things.

First, when his life falls apart, Joseph doesn’t sulk about it.  After a Mrs. Robinson encounter with Potipher’s wife, Joseph is falsely accused of hitting on her.  He finds himself imprisoned.  He could have just felt sorry for himself, but instead he looks for the opportunity in this new situation.  He meets two Egyptian officials who have also been incarcerated and correctly interprets their dreams for them.  Down the road, this leads to him being released from prison and being elevated to the number two position in Egypt.

A Messy Life: Dreaming Amidst Dysfunction

Remember how, when you were a kid, you were so willing to answer the question, “So what do you want to be when you grow up?”  No matter how challenging or unlikely your dream occupation may have been, you didn’t hesitate to say it.  Astronaut.  Olympic athlete.  Spy. Ballerina. Movie star.  All of them seemed to be within the reach of our young imaginations.  Although they seemed innocent enough, these dreams of fame and fortune were often fueled by childish needs for attention or approval.  As children, let’s face it, our dreams were often rooted in less than magnanimous motivations.  But even though those dreams of the future were unlikely and even sometimes egotistical, for many of us, they sustained us through childhood and beyond.

The character of Joseph shares that trait with us.  He is described as a dreamer.  He is mocked and hated for it.  His dreams are audacious, unlikely and a tad conceited.  This is exactly what we would expect because, surprisingly, Joseph’s background was a lot like some of ours.

Joseph was the great grandson of the Hebrew patriarch Abraham and the son of Jacob, sometimes referred to as Israel. Coming from a family of famous Bible characters, we might expect Joseph to have grown up in the perfect idyllic setting.  After all, these are all the spotless heroes of faith we learned of in Sunday School.  Leave your delusions of patriarchal perfection behind.  Joseph’s family had some serious issues.

Let’s look at some of their family history.  Great-granddad Abraham once tried to sell his wife off to gain safe passage to Egypt.  He also took his son Isaac to the top of a mountain, tied him to a rock and attempted to kill him because he believed God was telling him to do so as a test of faith.  That must have made for some awkward holiday dinner conversation.  After surviving that episode and growing blind in his old age, Isaac was conned by his son Jacob (Joseph’s dad) into giving him the inheritance that rightfully belonged to Jacob’s brother.  Jacob went on to become a trixter who tricked a man into giving him his daughter in marriage. In other words, Joseph’s family makes Jon and Kate’s look positively functional.

Mythbusters: Do You Hate Your Body?

         Do you hate your body?  Statistics show that a good portion of you would answer “yes” to that question.  There are entire industries that rely on us hating our bodies.  Beauty products like make-up, hair color all exploit at our insecurity about our bodies.  In many advertisements women are portrayed as unhealthily thin, and a body image is promoted that leads many young girls into struggles with eating disorders.  Even healthy products and services like exercise equipment and gyms motivate us to change our behavior by preying on our low image of our bodies.

Beyond that, most advertisements presume we hate our bodies, even if they aren’t specifically selling us a product to improve them.  Think about it.  Have you ever seen an out-of-shape person in a car commercial?  From watching TV, one might even assume that the best way to get a hot body is to drink beer, since, at least in commercials, it seems all the people with the best bodies drink beer or at least attend beer-related events.

One would expect that Christian culture would offer us an alternative to holding our bodies in low esteem, but sadly that is not always the case.  In Christianity, it seems that not only do we hate our own bodies, we hate everyone else’s body as well.  In fact we hate the idea of bodies.

For the most part, throughout much of Christian history, the human body has been portrayed as something in which evil resides.  The body is where all kinds of human lusts and desire fester that must be repressed and eventually done away with.