22nd Sunday after Pentecost

October 28, 2007

Rev. Elizabeth Macaulay

“Many Coats, Many Colors”

Genesis 37: 3-4, 23-24, 28, 34-35; 50:20a

Matthew 6: 19-21, 25-34

I share with you a story told by Will Bowen in his book A Complaint Free World. Remember the purple bracelets? He has written a book about how our inner lives and outer worlds determine so much of the reality that is our lives.

Bowen tells the story of how it was he was working at his home one day and he heard on the street outside a sound that pierces the heart - a thud, followed by the eerie sound of an animal screaming.

He ran outside, and there he saw his beloved golden retriever, Ginger, laying in the road. She was trying to get up on her front legs, but was clearly violently wounded in her hind quarters. His wife and daughter joined him in the street, cradling their dog while tears poured from them, all the while hearing the screams of pain from their beloved pet.

Bowen was devastated. And he noticed, in the midst of the noises of his daughter’s and dog’s grief, a pickup truck hauling a trailer zooming up the hill at a really fast clip.

Saturated in all that emotion, Bowen became furious at the driver of that vehicle. He was sure that the truck had hit his dog and he was going to catch the person who had hit his dog and had not even had the compassion to stop and see how badly he had hurt her.

He jumped into his car, and took off after the truck. He tells of driving faster and faster, his fury pushing him to drive at a crazy pace, until he realized that killing himself by chasing down the truck that had hit his dog would only cause more pain for his wife and daughter. So he slowed down to an over-the-speed-limit but safer pace.

He followed the man, who was unaware he was being followed, until he turned into his driveway and stopped. Bowen jumped out of his car screaming at the man:

“You hit my dog!”

The man turned and looked at him and said, “I know I hit your dog…What are you going to do about it?”

His response took Bowen completely by surprise. He couldn’t believe what he had heard.

So he shouted “What, what did you say?!”

The man gave him a look dripping with scorn and unconcern and said, in a slow and deliberate way, as though he were talking to someone completely beneath him, “I know I hit your dog…Exactly what are you going to do about it?”

This made Bowen absolutely unhinged. He had never gotten into a fight, but he kept seeing his daughter standing over Ginger and crying, so he told the man to put up his hands. He wanted to fight so badly.

The man responded by giving Bowen the kind of grin that rubs salt in any kind of wound, telling him that he wasn’t going to fight, and that if Bowen took a swing at him, he would charge him with assault.

And then he turned his back on Bowen and walked slowly away, seeming to taunt him with his every step.

Bowen was furious. He got back into his car. He went back to soothe the heartache of his wife and daughter, and to tend his own grief as he held his dog while the vet put her to sleep.

He was haunted for days by the cruelty and nonchalance of the man and the phrase “what are you going to do about it?” kept him awake at night. His anger poisoned his days and his nights as he imagined all of the ways he wanted to hurt that cruel man.

On the third night of sleeplessness, he got up to journal, because the churn of anger in his stomach had to be expressed somehow. It was driving him nuts. And as he wrote, he found himself writing something surprising:

“Those who hurt are hurting.”

Joseph, in today’s lesson, was a dazzling man. He was one of those people with immense charisma. He was fine to look upon, and one of those people that you want to sniff around in order to find flaws, because he was so shining.

And, he was the favorite son of his father’s favorite wife. His mother died while giving birth to him, and his father poured into Joseph all the love and devotion he had poured onto his wife Rachel. So Jacob gave him a many-colored coat, an outward symbol of the delight he took in him.

Well, many of us have grown up with siblings. And even if we are only children, we know well the gnaw of discontent that can take us over sometimes when we feel like we are getting the short end of the stick. Mom likes you better, you got the dish set, Dad took you fishing more, you got more allowance than I did, you got to go to a better school than I did, the litany of bile bullets can go on and on…. Am I right?

And it feels good on one level. Righteous indignation and a sense of nursing our wounds can give us some energy for a time.

But when we get stuck there living with and nursing our resentments about what we don’t have, we are making ourselves sick. Literally.

Joseph’s brothers were hurting units. They allowed their resentments to fester in their bellies. And then - gee, this never happens in families or groups like churches, does it? - they enjoyed the communal soul-mangling that comes with tearing a brother down.

You can almost hear them, can’t you? Muttering to each other, exchanging glances when Jacob can’t see them doing it, a raised eyebrow here or a cruelty toward Joseph there.

They couldn’t stand the beauty and promise of their brother. So they nursed their resentments and decided that rather than live with the tension of a brother who seemed remarkable, they were going to do what gets done in Jr. Highs and corporations across this land.

They were going to make Joseph pay for being beloved and wonderful.

They tossed him down a well. A pretty overt form of sabotage. Because with Joseph out of the picture, they could go about their lives without the pain and challenge he evoked by his mere presence.

It’s the tall poppy syndrome. Anything standing up and being powerful and beautiful runs the risk of being mown down. Why? Because being powerful and beautiful challenges others to be the same. And people who don’t want to be challenged can turn into resentful, hurting units in no time.

So they sabotage. Hurting people hurt people. Sometimes we don’t even know we are doing it.

Next Sunday we are receiving financial pledges of support for this, your church. We have spent the month talking about the stories we have to share - stories of faith and beauty and power. And we have talked about how fantastically we are gifted by God. As individuals, as a church, as a people. We have talked too about our budget and what it takes to create ministry and discipleship through our church. This morning you will receive as you leave a packet with information about our budget, our vision, and our belief in the Technicolor dream coat which is this church.

God has favored us immensely. We have a rich heritage of 154 years of outreach from this place. We have children to bring up in the faith and we have elders who are willing to share their stories and their care. We have a beautiful church in which to worship and share abundance with our neighborhood, through programs like Rich Harvest and Volunteers Enlisted to Assist People, and Caring for Children. We have an amazing staff who are committed to working together to help people find community and ministry through this place.

We are beloved of God, blessed with the vision and presence of Jesus. We are radiant and beautiful and that is a sometimes dangerous thing, all that potential and possibility.

Why? Because it scares us, maybe. If we allow ourselves to own and wear before the world our coat of many colors, we will be looked to for leadership and witness in this world that needs so badly to hear and imagine into being the teachings of Jesus.

So maybe, just maybe we do some of the works of the brothers. We mutter about things, we talk about what isn’t so great about living into our promise, and we conspire, maybe, to sabotage our glory.

How is that? By not trusting in the beauty and promise of the movement of Jesus in this place enough to fund it fully.

Every year for near a decade, we have financially sabotaged the multicolored glory that is our ministry together. Every year we have had to ask again and again for the support we need to create community in the way of Jesus. Every year we have felt the excitement of creating a vision for a community alive and thriving and vibrant and dazzling in its beauty. And this year? We want to live into our promise.

Listen. With foreclosures and job insecurities and fixed incomes and skyrocketing medical costs, we all know that this is a challenging time to see past the anxiety of our own checkbooks.

But hear the teaching from Matthew. A core teaching from the Sermon on the Mount:

(read text)

The finance committee asked each work area to create a vibrant vision for their ministry area. They did. It includes things like more hours for Hal, our Minister of Senior and Pastoral Care. It includes things like advertising, so that we can share with the community who we are. It includes things like a full time children family and youth staff position, so that we can grow our future. It includes things that will take the dazzle of our promise to the streets.

It’s a budget that is roughly $100,000 more than last year’s budget. That is an increase of $400 per giving unit.

Do you know what happened to Joseph? He was rescued from that well. Sold into slavery, where his abilities as an interpreter of dreams brought him to the attention of the Pharaoh. Joseph became a powerful man. Because of a famine in their land, his brothers eventually found themselves coming to Joseph for help. And he granted it, and they were reconciled.

There was a lot of learning and pain that happened within that family before they became willing to see Joseph’s gifts as blessing. But finally they came to see that his shine was a gift that needed sharing.

So it is with this church. We work in partnership with the Holy Spirit. God will provide, provided we don’t pitch ourselves into the well. We’re not well dwellers! We are meant to wear our colors with joy and gratitude, because the same God who clothed the lilies of the field is aching for us to live into our promise.

May it be so, may it be so.

Amen