Spiritual Weight Loss

Spiritual Weight Loss
A Sermon preached at St. Luke's Church
by The Rev. James B. Craven III
on the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, 14 August 2005

In the name of God - Father, Son & Holy Spirit. Amen
     Joseph was a little twerp, a type we have all known. Some of us may have been little twerps. Joseph had ten older brothers and without question he was the favorite of his father Jacob, or so it seemed to the older boys. In reality Jacob likely loved them as much as he did Joseph, but like the brother of the prodigal son, they just didn’t see it that way. What they saw was Joseph sleeping late and being waited on hand and foot while they trekked out to the fields and the range, to tend the crops and herd the cattle. They saw Joseph getting an allowance that exceeded what they made through hard work. Worse, Joseph just lorded it over them, delighting in recounting dreams he had of all of them working for him. He was simply a precocious little twerp. And Jacob had a special multi-colored coat made for him, which Joseph of course wore as a royal robe. Well one day the boys had just had it with Joseph. Some actually wanted to kill him, but that was too much for Reuben and Judah. Fortunately their voices were heard, so Joseph was thrown into a dry well, then hauled out and sold to some passing nomadic Midianite traders. The brothers dipped Joseph’s fancy coat into a goat’s blood and went home and told their father it was apparent that something terrible had happened to Joseph. It reminds me of a trial some years ago in McDowell County over the death of a fellow named Jim. A lawyer asked a witness “What did you do when you discovered Jim’s body on one side of the railroad tracks and his head on the other side.” The witness replied “I thought to myself, something terrible must have happened to Jim.”
    And we think some of our own family squabbles or resentments are something. Pat Conroy’s mother’s synopsis of all Southern literature fits much of our Old Testament history: The night the hogs ate Willie, Mama nearly died when she heard what Daddy had done to Sister.
    Although Jacob was afraid he would never again see his son Joseph, and the brothers surely assumed that was the case, as we know the story played out otherwise. Those Midianite traders who bought Joseph took him with them to Egypt and sold him to the head of the Pharaoh’s security force. Skipping ahead now some years, Joseph is running the country as Pharaoh’s right hand man. There is famine back home in Caanan, so old Jacob sends the lads to Egypt to buy food. And of course they run into Joseph. He recognizes them, but he has grown up so much they have no idea who he is.
    We might think Joseph would hold a grudge after all these years against these brothers of his who had sold him into slavery and who might have killed him had not Reuben and Judah stepped forward. No, there was no hint of anger or resentment in Joseph. He simply gathered his brothers in private and said, as we heard earlier: I am Joseph. Is my father still alive? His brothers of course were dumbstruck, so he said again: I am your brother Joseph. And more, you aren’t responsible for me being here. God sent me here so at the appointed time I might take care of you, to preserve God’s remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. God sent me to preserve life.
    This is the wonderful truly critical meaning I think of the whole story of Joseph, a story we all know in part at least but have also forgotten. We see in this the divine purpose in Joseph’s life, even back to when he was a little twerp, and we see in it also a hint of the salvation exodus to come, and the power inherent in forgiveness. Lest we miss it, the lesson is reinforced at the end of the Joseph story, after Jacob’s death. The brothers, still understandably feeling guilty about what they had done to the young Joseph, said: It may be that Joseph will hate us now and pay us back for all the evil which we did to him. But Joseph said to them: Fear not, for am I in the place of God. As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. So do not fear, I will provide for you and your little ones…And he reassured them, comforted them, and forgave them.
    And we hope that his brothers, Reuben, Judah and the rest, accepted Joseph’s forgiveness and understood that they were forgiven. The Joseph story, Chapters 37 - 50 of Genesis, can be easily read in an hour, and it’s better than most of what is on TV, but a warning - you may get hooked. And you may find yourself thinking a lot about family and forgiveness.
    I have never seriously thought about killing anyone, never thrown anybody down a well, and have certainly never sold anyone into slavery. I have however hurt folks, occasionally by the things I have done, but more often by things I have said. And I have long wished my memory of those things wasn’t so good. Sure I have been hurt by others, as we all have, but for the most part I have been pretty good about forgetting those times. It took awhile, like in the past ten years, but I finally figured out after much self-inflicted heartache that bearing a grudge meant that I had to carry a burden around with me. It didn’t increase the other person’s workload one whit. Instead I was myself doing the heavy lifting, and all the time I was mad at the other person for causing it, or so I thought. Maybe you have been there. It is interesting that forgiving and accepting forgiveness are both actions we can take which lighten our load considerably. Call it spiritual weight loss. It’s a whole lot easier than the other kind of weight loss, but too often we just don’t think of it as an alternative. We don’t realize that we don’t have to go through life toting heavy and unhealthy baggage. We forget how tiring it is. We think we are beat at the end of the day because the work was so hard, forgetting that there may well be another reason. Pick up a 50 pound suitcase and carry it all day. It will affect your posture, your work production, your demeanor, your energy, and so on. Get rid of that load though, and by George you stand up straighter, you move faster, you accomplish more, you are a lot happier, you probably sleep better, and you have so much more energy than you ever thought possible - energy which can get us off that treadmill we so often find ourselves on, to do what God has given us to do, to do our own part to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.
    So just how do we go about this? What’s the secret to this spiritual weight loss program? Glad you asked. I sort of figured it out, with some help, one night at the federal prison chapel where I served for 17 years. We had never had an offertory in our weekly Eucharist, never mind that the Prayer Book clearly calls for it. Pass the plate? We didn’t even have a plate, and heaven knows none of the guys had any money in their pockets. So why bother? I can scarcely believe now I was that wooden, unimaginative, and unfeeling in my thinking, but we do grow up and learn from our mistakes, or we should. Anyway, with some help from a fellow priest, I saw through the trees and came to understand that there is so much more besides money that we can put in the plate when it is passed, or better yet that we can put right up here on the altar. For starters, ourselves, who we are and who we want to become, maybe even who we were. Our hopes and our fears. Our prejudices, our total failures and our wonderful successes. Our loved ones, those we love but cannot reach, our grudges and bitterness of course, the best parts of us and the warts, all of them. Our lovingly tended neuroses, our issues as they say, our carefully crafted defenses, the walls we build to keep others out and ourselves in, the prisons and tombs we fool ourselves into thinking are homes, our anxieties and addictions, all those things and people we care about, and all the baggage that weighs us down. Dump all that in the plate, put all of it on the altar, lighten the load for a change and see if we can’t get the job done better, quicker, more pleasantly, and all for the glory of God as the Jesuits say. We are put on this earth, for a relatively short period of time, not just to go to work or even to go to church, but to go out of here into the real world of the Four Horsemen, famine, pestilence, destruction, and death, and be Christ to that world to the best of our ability. Few if any of us can win a Nobel prize, but we can all of us give a cup of cold water to one in need, as Florence Nightingale did for the soldiers in the Crimea. We can all do that, and if we start, two things will happen. It will catch on and others will follow, and we won’t be able to stop. We will be on course, with the divine wind behind us.
    Roy Campanella, the great Brooklyn Dodger catcher, figured this out earlier than I did. For those too young to remember the Brooklyn Dodgers, of blessed memory, they played in a glorious time, as I used to tell my children, when there were truly real giants as big as Goliath in New York, giants who lived in Harlem at the Polo Grounds. Sadly those Giants, and the Dodgers, moved to California in 1958 in what was beyond doubt the greatest non-wartime tragedy of the 20th century, but I digress.   A gentle happy soul who did so much from the paralysis of his wheelchair the last 35 years of his life, he invented the donut while playing for the Dodgers. The donut, in baseball, looks just like a donut, only it is made of cast iron and weighs about a pound. Campy figured out that if he put one or two on his bat and swung it while waiting to hit, when he got to the plate and discarded the donut, his 34 ounce bat felt light as a feather and he could swing it with ease, to the peril of third basemen and left fielders. He put that extra weight on his bat for a purpose, but the same law of physics works for us all with all the excess baggage we have just accumulated over the years. Campy led by example, and he taught us much by his lack of bitterness, his grace, good humor, courage, and his donut.
    In a few moments we will join in the general confession, confessing our sins against God and our neighbor. A good opportunity to get rid of some stuff there, and by the way we may need to be reminded from time to time that the Prayer Book rite of reconciliation, or what used to be called confession, is always available to any who want or need it. It is said that all may, none must, and some should. After the absolution and the exchange of the peace will come the offertory, when we hear the invitation to walk in love as Christ loves us, and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God. I hope now that all of us, you and I together understand better that call and that opportunity, thanks be to God.
                            Amen.
St. Luke’s
14 August 2005