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.
Joseph, being a naive young man, stirs the pot of
family dysfunction even further.
As the son of his father’s favorite wife, he was also a favorite
son. As such, his father made him
a very special ornamental tunic, a coat of many colors as it is traditionally
called.
Let me offer a bit of family relationship
advice. If your the little brother
who always tattles on your older brothers (as we are told Joseph did), and your
father gives you a special present, you might want to play that down a
bit. The last thing you want to do
is flaunt it in front of your siblings.
Yet that is exactly what Joseph does. Not only does he go skipping out to the fields in his fancy
new coat, he also tells his brothers about his dreams. What’s worse, Joseph’s dreams consist
of some not so subtle metaphors that one day his brothers would bow down to
him. Now I’m no expert in family dynamics, but when you have eleven older
brothers, I would humbly suggest that this is not a good idea. Face it, at this point in the story
even I want to beat the crap out of this kid.
Here we have this obnoxious, precocious kid
stirring up jealousy in this messed up family. How in the world could any good come out of this? As we’ll see in the next few weeks,
through a long convoluted process, God uses this dysfunctional family for good.
That is good news for all of us, because few of us
live our lives in Sunday School perfection. Our lives are messy. Our lives are complicated. Our families and relationships are entwined with
dysfunctions, resentments and imperfections. I rarely meet anyone who describes
their life as perfect and when I do I have learned to be suspicious. Because usually it means there is a
huge mess they are sweeping under a rug somewhere.
Yet here is the amazing thing about us human
beings. In the midst of all this
mess that constitutes our lives - we dream dreams. We dream about better lives for ourselves and for our
families. We dream about doing
something in the world that is of value.
We may even dream about accomplishing something that makes us feel
better about ourselves or wins us the approval of others. That may cause us to feel a twinge of
guilt or question whether our dream is worth pursuing. But as people who live messy lives,
which is only to be expected.
Our dreams, although sometimes flawed or
self-serving may actually be a foretaste of God’s true dreams for us. God has a
dream for your life and for mine.
Some of us may know that dream clearly. For others, that dream is rarely
as clear as it was for Joseph. God
can take our self-serving dreams and transform them into radical dreams that
grow God’s kingdom exponentially.
You may be an ambitious person and you may have been told that ambition
has no place in kingdom of God.
Well self-serving ambition does not. But God can use your ambitious
wiring to accomplish great things, not for yourself, but for God’s purposes in
the world. Our churches suffer
from people with little ambition but to keep their doors open and clergy with
no ambition but to collect their pensions. God can use people like you.
Maybe you’re the kind of person who angers easily
and gets worked up about things.
You’ve been told to repress your passions. You need to be a nice safe Christian. God can use your passion to get fired
up about the injustice in this world, and work to transform it. Or perhaps you are someone who has
accumulated some wealth in your lifetime.
God can use your resources to support and advance God’s project of
reconciliation and renewal.
Through following Christ, God can take our messiest traits and use them
for something incredible.
One of the dreams Pam and I had when we started
this church was that it could be a church for messy people. Not a place where people put on a
facade of having a perfect life, or even pretend to be a perfect church, but a
place where anyone could come in all their messiness. A place people could come with their broken dreams and have
those dreams renewed and transformed by the love of Jesus Christ and and this
community to discover God’s new dream for their life.
In the past few months, God has fulfilled a dream
for this church. After years of
praying and searching, God has given us this incredible new location. God has given us dreams that are going
to happen very soon and right here on this campus. Over the summer, we will be making the needed repairs to these
buildings, much of it funded by the generosity of the Amity Presbyterian Church
who worshipped here before us.
But there are also dreams which we have to fulfill
ourselves and with our own resources.
For instance, we will be enlisting many of you to help in giving the
house next door a makeover so that in September, we can re-launch it as
VisionKids’ new home. In addition,
God has also given us the dream that by the beginning of 2010 we become a
church of at least 200 people worshipping here each week. That’s double our attendance at the
beginning of 2009. We also were
given the dream of doubling our giving in that same time and we are well on our
way to doing that. This is not merely wishful thinking. We have all seen first-hand here at
Vision, how God’s dreams are fulfilled.
But it doesn’t end there. Those are just short-term dreams God has given us in order
to dream even bigger. God did not
bring us here to be a nice little country chapel or just to dress up and play
church every Sunday. God gave us
this place for a greater purpose.
It is from this place that we will make new followers of Jesus and
through his power, transform our community and the world. God will do that by giving us
dreams. God will give me dreams as
the principle vision-caster of this church and give all of you dreams for
ministry and living as faithful disciples of Jesus.
So I invite you to use the coming weeks and months
to pray, to talk in your Vision groups, or with me or Pam, to read your Bible,
and to dream. God has a dream for
you to fulfill through this church in your life. As the story of Joseph tells us, God’s purposes can be
accomplished even through the most obnoxious of people with the messiest of
lives. So that means that God can
work through each and every one of us.
God has a dream for your life. A wise pastor once said, you’ll know if
it’s God’s dream because it will be something you could never do by
yourself. A God-sized dream is so
big that only God can do it. So on
the messiest days of your life, take assurance in this, in the midst of the
mess, God is still working the dream.
A message from Genesis 37 by Don Heatley, pastor of Vision Community Church, Warwick, NY
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