Always There

Believe it or not being a pastor isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. I know it’s hard to believe but its’ true. To help illustrate that, I wanted to share with you my first call as a pastor. While there is so much to this story I want to keep it to the essential and pertinent information as I can. After being in my first call for a year and a half I went to our monthly council meeting, in May, and the entire council was told by the treasurer that if we did not dramatically change our spending and raise our giving the church would be closed by the end of the year. The next month in June at our bi-annual congregational meeting our treasurer with other members who had not attended the church for years showed up and voted in a completely different council than the one that had been worked on by the election committee.

It was at that point that I found out that there were members who had not been attending the church for some time because they were disgruntled with the church’s decision to purchase a new campus because they had outgrown the other one. They had been meeting in secret and decided that this was the time to take their church back. As this transition to this new council took effect, I found myself meeting with mostly people I had never seen before trying to change my call as a pastor of the congregation. Over the short period of maybe two months or so they attempted to convince me to be a part time pastor, a part time youth pastor, and a part time youth director. After not agreeing to any of these ideas, I was then told that I had until the end of the year to find a new call or I would be out of a call.

Despite the bishop and others telling me it would be at least 9-12 months before I would find a call, I got the paperwork, interviewed and accepted a call as the associate pastor in a tiny town called Shelton in Washington state. If you hear me talk about ministry in other contexts I can all but guarantee you that I am talking about my time at Faith Lutheran Church in Shelton, WA. Had I not felt the call from the Spirit to move on from that place I could easily see myself as having continued to serve there for a long time.

Anytime I read this part of Joseph’s novella, where we hear his famous words that while his brothers intended something bad for him, God was able to produce something good for it. And I really like the way that the CEB translation words this phrase because it makes it seem more relatable than other translations like what you see on the screen. Essentially what this says to me is that even though Joseph went through all these bad things with almost being killed to being sold in slavery, to the ordeal with Potiphar’s wife and being thrown in prison, that despite what all these humans did to try to do harm to him, Joseph sees the way that God was able to produce good from it.

That this also helps me to see is that God didn’t intend evil or bad for Joseph, people did. God didn’t say well lets have his brothers do all these horrible things so that one day he can become the right hand to Pharaoh. Instead God worked through what was happening to Joseph in order to bring about God’s plan that God began with Abraham, who we talked about last week.

That is how I see what I went through in my first call. No I do not want to relive those days, but had I taken another call than that one as my first call, I may not have left California for Washington and served Faith and worked with one of the most incredible pastors I have ever worked alongside. But God did cause all of that to happen in order to get me to Washington, but becuase of what people did God was able to work through the situation and through me and others to bring me to something much better.

There are so many things that we all go through in our lives and sometimes it’s hard to see the way that God is working through it. Sometimes it’s hard to even see how we are going to work our way through it let alone be able to see God in the midst of it. We don’t see Joseph talk about God bringing him through it until this point when he engages with his brothers after all of the ordeals are over. Joseph looks back and sees how God was with him and that the world tried to send him down one path but with his relationship with God, Joseph was able to forge a new path with God’s help and guidance.

I was directed to a podcast called “Everything Happens” by Kate Bowler where she hosted a Rabbi by the name of Steve Leder. The conversation they had centered around grief and how to engage with people who are going through grief. As Steve Leder was talking in the podcast, one of the things he said was this, “If you have to go through hell, don’t come out empty handed”. In other words, if you are going through something terrible, whether it’s family problems like Joseph, professional work problems like my first call, or anything else you are facing, remember that there is always something you can take from it, and there are ways that we can handle situations that will help us to come out on the other side with something to hold onto.

Clearly, we see that Joseph held onto God through the hell he went through and not only was he elevated to the highest level in Egypt other than Pharaoh himself, he was able to save his estranged family in the process and thus help to save God’s promise that God had made to their ancestors. By trusting God in a very uncertain time of my life not only did I find a call in an incredibly short time, I found a call that helped me to live out my gifts and calling as a pastor and to find a pastor that was an incredible example for me.

I hope that you can look at your own life story and see the times that God produced something good from something bad, or in the words of Rabbi Steve Leder, that you were able to come out of hell not empty handed. For we should all know that with the love and the promises of God that are always fulfilled as we looked at last week, that there is no place and no period of time in which God is not with us every step of the way producing something good in your life, in your very being so that you know that God is by your side, and on your side every step of the way. Amen.