What is Right and What is Easy: Cedric Diggory and the Passover

Scripture: Exodus  12:1-13, 13:1-8

            In the fourth book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the storyline begins to take a darker turn. The evil wizard, Voldemort, returns from being almost-but-not-quite-dead and the first thing he does is murder a boy-wizard named Cedric Diggory. As Goblet of Fire ends, Dumbledore—if you are unfamiliar with the books, Dumbledore is the headmaster at the wizarding school, Hogwarts—eulogizes Cedric before the student body with these words, "Remember Cedric. Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory."

            The Passover is to the Israelites what Cedric Diggory would be for the wizarding world—minus the flying broomsticks and butterbeer. The Passover, and accompanying Feast of Unleavened Bread, is about remembering the oppression and cruelty of the past in order to keep from repeating them in the future. It is a tradition that originates out of the Israelites’ slavery in Egypt and the killing of the firstborn that finally led to their exodus. These festivals were instituted by God to remember the cruelty of slavery so that it may not be repeated, but they also serve a secondary purpose: they are an antidote for nostalgia.[1] Those of you who know the story of the exodus well may remember how quickly the Israelites are in need of this antidote. They can practically still see the Red Sea—the site of the miraculous parting of the waters—many of them still have the lashes of the slave-drivers, persecuted by a Pharaoh who did not know Joseph and was therefore unaware of their history, and still those Israelites quickly turn on Moses and wish to go back to the land of Egypt—site of the good ol’ days. Nostalgia, even for times that were not good by any measure, is a uniquely human response to adversity. When difficulty comes, the Israelites need to be reminded again and again that they are fleeing from a broken past and the journey—no matter its challenges—is worth it. The Passover bids them to remember the past in order to set their course for the future.

            The Israelites’ situation is not that different from the one facing the wizarding world when Voldemort returns, or, for that matter, our world today. We need something to rally behind in order to keep from wishing away our lives forever gazing into what has been. Why did the wizarding world need to remember Cedric Diggory? Because they were about to be plunged into internal conflict under questioned leadership. Why did the Israelites need a festival to remember the Passover? Because they were about to be plunged into internal conflict under questioned leadership. Where are we today? In constant internal conflict under questioned political, economic, social, and religious leadership.

            The world turns, but things—whether in the wilderness, at Hogwarts or in Kittson County—hardly change; we face the same challenges and tough choices. We are in need of an antidote for nostalgia. There is much that is wrong with the world today and also much that we are indebted to the past, but we make a terrible mistake when we get our destiny backwards. God’s future for us is just that—in our future, ahead of us. History does not move backwards toward the Garden of Eden. We are always moving forward, like Israel, into a future promised to us, and again—like Israel—our entrance into it will be kicking and screaming and dragging our feet. We want to go back. God pushes us forward.

That is why we must remember. Remember the Passover. Remember the times when we have been persecuted and remember when we have been the persecutors. Remember human beings at their worst—Darfur and Auschwitz, the Gulags, apartheid, slavery, the Inquisition, the Third Reich; it goes on and on. Remember all our Cedric Diggorys. I’m not just talking about issues bigger than what we can control. We need to process together all the mistakes we have made; we need to be unafraid of what we may discover if we go deeper.

What we will inevitably find is that at our base we are all like the Israelites, eager to return to what is comfortable in our past. Left on our own we will do things how we’ve done them before; if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Even if it is broke, pretend like it isn’t and do it just the same. We will reach back for a past as beautiful and shiny as it is unrealistic and untrue. At our base this is who we are, but in no small part because of the God who leads us forward we are also much more than this. God re-orients us—God reminds us—where our true destiny lies.

At its core that is what festivals are about: remembering something important from our past and remembering who we are; not so that we can repeat that past but so that we can live into the future. Festivals tell us something true about the past in order to tell us something true about the present, and in-so-doing they tell us that the most important moment for the history of the faith is always right now. It’s the only moment that includes all other moments, learns from all moments, and bridges where we have been to where we are going. Festivals are a bridge from the past to the future on which we stand right now with a choice before us—forward or backward; what is right or what is easy.

Remember Cedric Diggory, Dumbledore said, because the time will come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy. Easy, comfortable—words for a time when there is nothing on the line—but the truth is that there is always something on the line. The Israelites teach us that God’s people are not just a generation away from extinction but only a moment away from turning back to the path that is easy. We live in such a world of luxury that we actually value things that are easy. Somehow the good life has been equated with comfortability. The Passover tears that comfort apart.

We are not our own, have never been our own, will never be our own. We are part of a web that stretches back to those Israelites and forward to the advent of the Kingdom of God in which no moment in time matters as much as here and now. We walk alongside the Israelites in the wilderness; we walk alongside all those hurt and broken; we stand for what we believe because of the God who works in and through us today and the God who worked in and through our ancestors before us. There is no separating the past and the present, just as there is no reliving what has happened before. The past is always behind us, reminding us of where we’ve been and tempting us to return, but the Promised Land lies ahead. Remember Cedric Diggory; remember the captivity in Egypt; remember the hurt you carry with you; then, allow that hurt to be the catalyst that pushes you forward.

It won’t be easy. That’s a promise. We have a choice—every day of our lives—between what is right and what is easy. Cedric Diggory bids us to choose well. So does the Passover.

Amen.

---

[1] Katheryn Schifferdecker, WorkingPreacher podcast

Creation, the Physical and the Spiritual

Adapted from a devotion for the WELCA Cluster Gathering at Red River Lutheran Church

Saturday, September 29, 2012

1 Corinthians 15:42-49

42 So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. ⁴³It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. ⁴⁴It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. ⁴⁵Thus it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. ⁴⁶But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. ⁴⁷The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. ⁴⁸As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. ⁴⁹Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.

Martin Luther loved to talk about the Old Adam--that sinful hanger-on in our lives in this world. This was how he talked about the already-but-not-yet nature of our redemption. It is also an introduction into his idea that we are simultaneously sinner and saint. The Old Adam is our sinful self; the new creation is the side of us drowned in the waters of baptism and raised a new creation. As Luther wrote in the Large Catechism, "These two parts, to be sunk under the water and drawn out again, signify the power and operation of Baptism, which is nothing else than putting to death the old Adam, and after that the resurrection of the new man."

This is another way to talk about our dualism as creatures both physical and spiritual. However, the language of physical and spiritual is largely misunderstood in our world. The passage above from 1 Corinthians resonates with the modern understanding of the separation of body and spirit (or soul). It's fairly common to think about the body as bad and the spirit as good; that the body is the corrupted part of us that awaits its spiritual redemption when our physical life is over. However, this is a misguided understanding of the whole of the biblical picture, and I believe it is a profound misreading of 1 Corinthians. We are indelibly both: physical and spiritual; bodies and spirits; sinners and saints. I turn to Wendell Berry: 

"I would like to purge my own mind and language of such terms as ‘spiritual,’ ‘physical,’ ‘metaphysical,’ and ‘transcendental’—all of which imply that Creation is divided into ‘levels’ that can readily be peeled apart and judged by human beings. I believe that the Creation is one continuous fabric comprehending simultaneously what we mean by ‘spirit’ and what we mean by ‘matter.’” (“Health is Membership,” 1994).

We have this problem since the fall from Garden of Eden. We think very poorly of our bodies in large part because we think of them as vessels of pleasure whose usefulness will wear out over time. Moreover we consider the pleasure itself to be a sign of sin, and we act as if the only way to control our brokenness is to subdue our physical to the spiritual. This is a hollow dualism. To disconnect our physical selves from our spiritual selves is to perform a lobotomy on our souls.

As Christians we proclaim a bodily resurrection—these bodies but changed. The ultimate physical nature of things will be revealed when the spiritual and the physical are understood as one; only then will the Old Adam dissipate in the face of our true physical/spiritual nature. Our bodies will be demonstrated, finally, to be both spiritual and physical; not one, not the other. This is counter-cultural but it is at the heart of the scriptural witness to resurrection. Matthew Dickerson writes:

"The biblical Christian account of eternal life does not correspond to the popular image of disembodied spirits hovering on clouds. Rather, the Christian idea of eternal life is once again that of embodiment: a life of both body and spirit. The body is important.

Put another way, Christian teaching about the death of the mortal body does not promise that the soul will go to heaven. Rather, the Christian hope given in the Bible is that heaven will come to earth, and the individual will be given a new body—or, perhaps, will be resurrected in a new body. That is, both the created earth and our bodies will be renewed or restored.” (The Mind and the Machine, Brazos Press, 2011)

Shoshone Base Camp--Prichard, Idaho, 2005

We do ourselves a disservice when we divide ourselves into separate natures. We are not souls trapped in bodies. The body isn't sin and the spirit divine. We are one fabric, as Wendell Berry wrote; in fact, all of creation is one fabric. Paul tells us in his letter to the church at Rome that "the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies" (Romans 8:22-23). Dualism does not mean that we are separate parts but in fact that we are wholly one in Christ, redeemed in every facet of our being. Our distinctions between the physical and the spiritual are finally just perceptions of a reality beyond our grasp.

Paul himself seems only to see this in part--his words in 1 Corinthians crash into the words from Romans--so I think we're excused for still wrestling with the implications today. But don't be confused, this is imminently important for how we live. The spiritual and the physical have never been more dissected and separated in any time in history than they are today. I believe we have a calling to point out this divorce and to reclaim our wholeness.

This is neither the start nor the finish, but it's a piece of the puzzle. 

Joy, Happiness, and the Way the World Doesn't Work

Earlier this week I attended a splendid NW Minnesota Synod Retreat and Conference whose keynote was Dr. Jacqueline Bussie, Professor Religion at Concordia College in Moorhead. She talked on hope and joy in a world of despair and grief, offering really practical suggestions for how this can impact our lives. Let me be frank, this may have been the best conference I've ever attended for its sheer usefulness to everything that I do as a pastor. These are some of my reflections, mixed with Dr. Bussie's insights, on the impact that joy can have on our lives.

We think we are all looking for happiness--that what really matters is whatever makes you happy. We tell ourselves that; we tell our children that. We retreat into the corner when something or somebody seeks to take that happiness away. I believe this is why we are not willing to talk seriously about grief and loss, because those are subjects that just sound too depressing to consider. They are contrary to the motto: Whatever makes you happy.

When I look at my own life I am not a particularly sad person, and so I often feel that same tendency to avoid grief and loss. Things are going pretty well; I have nobody close to me sick or dying, no imminent loss that I know of, nothing that should be able to deter my immediate happiness. This is my fortune, but it's not simply the case that we turn on and off feelings of grief and sorrow or, for that matter, control when they may come. All of us--if we live long enough--will experience moments of absurd suffering; moments that show our happiness to be no match for despair.

This is because happiness is actually a pretty shallow emotion. For all the face time we give to being happy it is not that momentary feeling--or state of mind--that keeps us going in times of grief. Instead, it is something else, something deeper, that persists when the foundations of our world shake.

Joy.

Joy is not the same thing as happiness, though the world tells us it is. Happiness is moment-by-moment; it is subject to the whims of the world; and it is always in conflict with sadness and despair. You can't be both happy and despairing; they are two sides of the emotional coin. Joy is something else. Joy may show itself in spurts, like happiness, but it is not quashed by sorrow. In fact, joy requires an understanding of the power that tragedy and despair have over our lives, and it protests that power, saying "No, sorrow and despair do not win. There is something stronger, something more real than loss." Happiness is internal conquest, but joy is resurrection.

Here is where that distinction becomes practical. Think about the most powerful moment of hope in your life. Think about the times that have strengthened your faith more than any other. What led to that moment? I am willing to bet there is at least a undertone of sorrow in those moments of hope. In fact, I bet that many of those moments of profoundest hope come intermixed with our most acute feeling of helplessness.

I think about the trip our youth took to Cortez, Colorado this summer and the joy we found there. We experienced intense sadness on that trip at the suffering of people whose lives we could not fix, but I think I can speak for the group and say with assurance that everyone of us had a favorable experience. What we experienced was not happiness--not as the world would define it. None of us came away content that the world was a great place for those children and families, and yet we felt a sense of wholeness in being there. It was a clear sense of joy; a power that says "This is not the end." Hunger and divorce, jailed family members and broken relationships do not destroy the human spirit that cries out in spite of their condition. Joy is always in spite.

Our youth (and adults) in Cortez

I worry that we are not joyful enough. We turn on the news and feel down because the media suggests that bombs and politics are the real story. We turn on the XBox and find contentment in mindlessness. We turn to things that are simple and make us happy: sex, alcohol, drugs. We put more importance in contests and pride--in our sports and our us-versus-them mentality--than we do in our unity and diversity. All of this is a culture that just wants to make us happy. It is a hungry beast. You keep feeding it and it will never be enough.

But I believe there is a better world out there. It is a world that discovers joy in the little things; that does not sell its soul for happiness but understands that sorrow is a natural part of life. We can learn from this. We can be bigger than our losses. We can experience true joy in the midst of things we do not understand. Joy does not conquer sadness; it lives in it. So, when the trappings of happiness fade away may you discover that there is a deeper joy that gives you hope. May you find it in the midst of things that the world considers depressing and dour. May you discover that nothing can contain the joy that is in you.

And may you share the joy that is in you with someone who needs to hear it.

The problem with "This is all part of God's plan"

Text: Exodus 3:1-12

"O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

I changed it up this week—the prayer, that is. This prayer, taken from the Evening Vespers service in the ELW, may as well have been Moses’ prayer. It’s also one of my favorites. The path before us is always only dimly lit. At my ordination last October, a professor mine preached on Psalm 119, which famously says “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path,” and he posited that the lamps that were around in the time of the Psalmist were really pretty weak things. We’re not talking 100 watt halogen bulbs; more like a candle wick only capable of penetrating a foot or two into the darkness.

That is the irony of the burning bush. Light imagery in the Bible so often has to do with knowledge of the future, and yet the burning bush offers only an end destination with no map to get there. It does not light Moses’ path; it just tells him the end result. God does not outline how Moses is going to deliver Israel from Egypt; he just tells Moses he needs him to do it.

If you’re a planner this would be a problem. Kate, my wife, would have a serious problem with these kinds of instructions. She’s a planner. She wants to know how things are going to go down to the finest detail. She needs to know dates, times, contact info; she makes packing lists, shopping lists, to-do lists, cleaning lists, cooking lists. I’m thinking Kate would not like to be summoned to a burning bush that tells her the end result without a map of how to get there. Come to think of it, I don’t think many of us would. Even I would have an issue with this call--and I am anything but a planner. But this is exactly how God calls us most of the time. We are not given all the information. We are not told how we should act or what we should do. All we are told is the end of the story. Whatever you believe is the simplest synthesis of the Christian faith—you are saved by grace through faith, or Christ has died for your sins, or love wins, or whatever answer you would give to that question—that promise gives direction to your life.  

And yet, none of those summations of our faith tell us exactly how to get there; they are at best partial blueprints of how to live right here, right now.

 Moses had no clue what to do. He wanted more information. So he asks for God’s name. It seems like an innocent request—the kind of thing we would like to know—on whose authority does this radical vision come? But the appeal for a name is hardly innocent. To know a name means to have a measure of control. Adam and Eve gain dominion over creation by giving names to all the creatures; now Moses is asking for God’s name not as a matter of clarification but in order to change the playing field. His request is sneaky, which makes God’s response all the more fantastic. My name? says God, “I AM WHO I AM.” In Hebrew: Yahweh, or even better (since the verb tense is not clear): “I will be who I will be."

God is going to be exactly who God will be, and we can do little to change that. God was going to make certain the people of Israel were led out of Egypt no matter Moses’ resistance. For us, God is bringing about salvation regardless of our petty wants and desires. It sounds strange to say it, but God isn’t so interested in the details. At the very least, the details aren’t the point of the story.

We don’t get this. I know, because just about every time something tragic happens I hear the same hollow words. I’m sure you have heard it too. I heard it again this week when a friend of a friend was tragically and senselessly killed. It seems like every time something like this happens somebody—well-meaning and good-hearted as they may be—says the magic words: “This is all part of God’s plan.” I understand the sentiment. We want to be able to say something helpful in a time of helplessness. We want to believe that nothing bad ever happens without a “good” to follow. We long for justice in cases that simply seem unjust, and since we believe in a just God it only follows that this must be part of some divine architecture for the universe. It's just that neither scripture nor experience show us a God who works like that.

Sometimes awful things just happen.

That’s not to say there is not justice for the hurt, joy for the sorrowed, and peace that surpasses the loss we experience in this life. There is. But it’s at the end of the story and not in the middle. God does have a plan but, as with Israel captive in Egypt, it is not the kind of plan that seeks to justify tragic loss as if it being part of God's will makes it better. That should be good news. It frees us from justifying every evil in the world as part of God’s plan; it frees us from defending God whenever anybody experiences loss; it frees us to get about the business of life in a complicated world and to stand alongside those who hurt without feeling the need to give a half-hearted reason for it all. God doesn’t give anybody cancer, but God is redeeming the cancer-sufferer. God does not take the lives of children because heaven needs another angel, but God does give to children the kingdom of God. God does not cause hurt, but God is with us in our suffering.

You see, the burning bush tells us that God does have a plan for us, but it is always bigger than we can figure. Sometimes it doesn’t involve us at all. Moses, for all the work he does in leading the people out of Egypt, never sees the Promised Land. Many of us will never see the fruits of our labor. To the world our lives will look like abject failures. For most of us, nobody is going to write a history of our lives; nobody is going to carve our faces on a mountain.

But, you know, that’s OK.

Our lives are not meant to be remembered. Our lives are meant to discover God, and to know God is not to ask God’s name; to know God is not to have your life planned out ahead of you like a carefully delineated trail map. To know God is to live every day of your life as if you might learn something about God. To know God is to ask yourself how God desires you to work, or how God might wish you to treat your family and friends; and to wonder how God impacts every decision of your lives not because God planned out all those instances and knows what you are going to do but because our lives are more sacred--and just better--with God in them.

Too often we dwell on who God is, what God is, and what we can say about God with certainty. When we find ourselves in that rut we stand like Moses before the burning bush asking, cleverly and all too ignorantly, “God, what is your name?”

I will be what I will be.

Take that, Moses. Take that, preachers and teachers who tell you who and what God is. Take that, books, magazine articles and TV shows debunking the divine. Take that, Confirmation and Sunday School classes. As a teacher of mine once said, “How do you like them apples, Moses?”

I do not know how God is impacting your life. I can’t tell you. All I can hope is that you’re open to seeing it. We believe in one God, and that God is much bigger than our declarations. We believe in one true faith, but that faith is lived by individuals through eyes that see the world in vastly different ways.

The important matter is not who God is but whether we are going to allow God to make any difference in our lives. What is God calling you to be? What is God calling you to do? I don’t care if it’s the voice of a bush lit with fire or quiet deliberations that you feel in your heart. The only way to discover what God would have you be is to live as if the God of the universe is with you now.

Thankfully, God is who God is. He will be what he will be. And he is here with you now and every moment of your lives.

Thanks be to God.

Stepping on God's Toes and Why We Are in Need of Forgiveness

Text: Genesis 50:15-21

            We all have our plans. Our lives can be broken down into little strategic endeavor after little strategic endeavor. We set goals—sometimes realistic, sometimes unrealistic. We try to see what the future holds. Uncertainty makes us nervous. The unknown is our greatest fear.

            When Israel dies Joseph’s brothers are afraid because the rules of the game have changed. Joseph now holds all the power and without their father in the picture he could easily turn on his brothers. They don’t know what the future holds, and just as Joseph’s plans concerning his sons—Ephraim and Manasseh—are turned upside down by Israel’s blessing, so the brothers’ plans are rocked by Israel’s death.

            The future is murky.

            This is the beginning of the first school year since I came to Hallock to serve as pastor and I’m sure when I came there were some hopes about what the church would look like by this time of the year. Probably some of those were realistic hopes—maybe I’ve even lived up to some expectations—but all too often we have huge hopes for a future that doesn’t end up resembling anything like what we would have thought. If you expected this pastor to bring in hundreds on non-church goers and fix every little issue this congregation has ever had you are probably feeling a bit disappointed. This is in no small part because it’s not my job to grow the church. If the church grows it is because God is doing it; not me, not you. And we simply don’t know what God is doing with us. All we know is that the present looks different from the past.

We could spend our time wishing that were not the case; we could wish that we would return to some glory days in the past when everybody attended church on every Sunday and all the women were strong, the men handsome and the children good-looking, but that’s a past that probably never existed; or we can come to the conclusion that our plans are mostly going to come to nothing. I’ve said this before: the only way to grow is to die. The only way to be a growing church is to be a church willing to accept that its plans are pretty much wrong, and the only one who can map our future out is God. I’m not saying if we do that hundreds of people will start pouring in. I’m not sure what God will do with us, but I am sure that we stand like Joseph’s brothers before an Almighty God, tricking, pleading and finally falling on our faces for our misdoings.

            Forgiveness. That is where it starts. You are forgiven for everything that has happened to you—both as a church and as individuals. There’s a reason we start our service every Sunday with confession and forgiveness; it’s not because we are little Lutheran Eeyores who have to dwell on our mistakes. It’s not because we are such awful people that I’ve decided we REALLY need forgiveness. Rather, it’s because when we measure ourselves against God we end up looking pretty pathetic. But there’s also another reason we begin with forgiveness and this is much closer to the place Joseph finds himself with his brothers. We forgive because it is the only way to stay in right relationship with one another.

            Now, I don’t feel like I need forgiveness from many of you for anything significant, but in small ways and often unintentionally I have not loved you as I love myself, I have ignored you when you wanted attention or pestered you when you didn’t want to be bothered. I have done all these things and I’m sure I’ll do it all again. So when we meet in worship, what better way to begin than with forgiveness for all of those things—known and unknown—that separate me from you and you from the other person in your pew. What better way to start a school year—with the busy season of the church ramping up again—than with forgiveness.

(Service of corporate confession and forgiveness here)

            Now, here’s where confession and forgiveness gets tricky. It’s easy—maybe too easy—to read confession from the hymnal; it’s easy also to say “I’m sorry” and only half mean it. What’s hard is standing where Joseph stood in a place of power over those coming to beg your forgiveness and to honestly say, “Am I in the place of God? Of course I forgive you.”

We should have big expectations for ourselves and greater expectations for this church, but the only thing that’s certain about the future is that we are going to try to follow our vision rather than the one God has laid out for us. We are going to try to get our way, effect our strategies, and make our changes. Since I have been called as pastor nobody has done a better job of messing up God’s plan than me. That’s the entitled, sorry position I have been called to. I’m constantly stepping on God’s toes. That’s how we work. That’s why we are in need of forgiveness.

But God’s working in exciting ways in spite of us. We have energy, we have a new school year and renewed pride in who we are, we have new staff, new Sunday Schoolers, new Confirmation students, perhaps soon a new staff member; new, new, new. And it’s all a testament to what God is doing. On our own we are just like Joseph’s brothers. And just as they cast Joseph into the pit, we have cast our own Josephs out. But never mind, “even though we intended to do harm, God intended it for good.” If that isn’t the moral of our lives I don’t know what is.

Amen.

Politics, Economics, and Joseph, Prince of Egypt

Text: Genesis 41:25-36,39-41

            This is the kind of scripture where I can easily get in trouble because at its heart is a story about farming. There is not much scarier than preaching for people who know far more than you about the subject you are talking about, and I’m about as qualified to talk about farming as most of you are about premillenial dispensationalism (and you can thank me later that I’m not talking about that). But thankfully, this isn’t only about farming; it’s also about politics and religion. Hey, what could possibly go wrong?

            Pharaoh has a problem: he has two bad dreams. He doesn’t know exactly what they mean, but he’s pretty certain that no good will come of them. As luck would have it our favorite dream interpreter, Joseph, just happens to be residing in one of Pharaoh’s prisons waiting for just this opportunity. And he knows exactly what Pharaoh’s dreams are about. Three things: land, food, and economics.

            These were the political hot-button issues of the day. If Pharaoh were going to strengthen his power it would be through understanding the land and its food and making the right strategic moves to better the economy. This shouldn’t sound so different from our own politics. These just happen to be the concerns at the forefront of life here in Kittson County. Land, food and economics.

            Things were simpler in Joseph’s day. There was no global economy, no corporations or large-scale businesses, but we shouldn’t confuse a simpler life with an easy life. Things were very tenuous. At the first drought you risked not only losing the farm but quite literally starving to death. There were no safety nets, no insurance, nobody to help save you but your family who was subject to the same natural disasters. In short, drought meant death.

           So when Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dreams it gives him an incredible economic advantage in an agrarian age. If you know when the drought is coming—and for how long—it is considerably easier to survive. Joseph’s interpretation gives Pharaoh both an economic and political advantage. Take 1/5 of your crops, Joseph says, for the next seven years and store the grain for those lean years ahead. This is the 1800 BC version of betting against the market.

            Most of us could use Joseph’s kind of inside knowledge. No matter your faith in the Farmer’s Almanac or the Weather Channel there is no way to know for certain what is coming. We routinely mock meteorologists for their faulty predictions. In the Twin Cities I would often listen to Dan Barreiro on KFAN perpetually ridicule the “weather terrorists,” as he calls them, especially Paul Douglas—or “the goof on the roof”—for his overly scientific but incredibly inaccurate forecasts. The weather is so big, so complicated, and so completely beyond our comprehension that predicting five days out is hard; never mind laying out the next fourteen years.

            This is why we save up. We are looking for a security blanket just in case the worst comes to pass. Maybe you’ve seen that television program, Doomsday Preppers—it’s essentially a documentary of people who build bunkers for the end of the world. This is the ideology right at its heart. We don’t know what’s coming; it may very well be bad; so we had better stock up… or else.

            But what is enough? What can assure our survival? The story of Pharaoh and Joseph is not about fear for the future; it’s a story about the advantage of knowing how much to save and how much to spend. Pharaoh furthers his political power because—thanks to Joseph—he knows how the resources he will have so he can wisely use what can be used and save what must be saved. Most of us have some idea what we will need—we might have budgets and 401K’s—but there are no guarantees. So it’s easy to become scared, and when we get scared about money, time and resources we become self-centered. Then, we treat our wealth as if it our rightful inheritance. Pretty soon, we forget that all of this comes from God—it never was ours; it can never become ours.

            We make the mistake that Egypt makes when this Pharaoh is no longer in power. We forget about Joseph and the God from whom this blessing came. We forget that everything that we have is God’s. Pretty soon, we are enslaving the things that were gifts freely given. It is amazing how quickly we turn from desperate prayer for survival in the face of extreme adversity to living as if it didn’t matter, as if our most desperate prayers were answered and yet we are entitled to more.

            As Joseph says to Pharaoh, “After [the seven years of plenty], there will arise seven years of famine, and all the plenty will be forgotten in the land of Egypt.” Will the people of Egypt remember the blessings of those seven years? Will they prepare in the boon times? No. They are going to forget all about it, and only out of desperation will they come to Joseph and Pharaoh, with starvation on their lips, and beg for the food they have kept in wait.

             Human beings are notoriously short-sighted. Look at our election rhetoric. What do we want? Short-term gains. When do we want them? Yesterday.

We listen to elected officials talk about economic gains and losses within the terms of various incumbents as if our economic history can be easily dissected into four or six-year chunks. We listen to advertisements about failed economic policies as if the only thing we need in our lives is a bigger and more massive “national economy” more disparate from the things we do in our lives, rather than smaller and more localized economies that values the lives and work of the community. We look at a story like the one of Pharaoh and Joseph and have half a mind to think, “Man, if only our leaders had that kind of foresight.”

But that’s a pipedream. They can’t. As far as I know God isn’t sharing dreams about future economic shortfalls. We don’t have that insider knowledge. This past week I listened to an adviser from Portico, formerly known as the ELCA Board of Pensions, talk about the people who want to tell you when the next “bear market” will be. She said the truth is they don’t know; they can’t know; if they did know they’d have all their money in at the right time. The reality of our lives is that we can only see dimly the future ahead of us. Like the weather terrorists of KFAN fame or the economic analysts we are slaves to a future that is not yet visible to us.

Because of this we are called to God’s kind of stewardship, which is caring for the resources that have been entrusted to us. What does God want of us in a world so unpredictable? The same as always: Love the Lord, your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. And in case you were wondering, yes, that means loving God with your money and your land and your food as well. No long-term, macroeconomic theory can trump the commandment to be present with those in need in our midst. You love your God not by holding on but by letting go of your need to be in control of what may come. The future is a mystery. The present is filled with people in need, people whose lives will interact with your own in ways we can’t anticipate. The world out there is in need of your love. Go. Show it. Be Christ. Love your neighbor. The rest is commentary.