Genesis 40:9-15
July 7, 2013
So the chief cupbearer told his dream
to Joseph, and said to him, ‘In my dream there was a vine before me, and on the
vine there were three branches. As soon as it budded, its blossoms came out and
the clusters ripened into grapes. Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand; and I took the
grapes and pressed them into Pharaoh’s cup, and placed the cup in Pharaoh’s
hand.’ Then Joseph said to him, ‘This is its interpretation: the three branches
are three days; within three days Pharaoh will lift up your head and restore
you to your office; and you shall place Pharaoh’s cup in his hand, just as you
used to do when you were his cupbearer. But remember me when it is well with
you; please do me the kindness to make mention of me to Pharaoh, and so get me
out of this place. For in fact I was stolen out of the land of the Hebrews; and
here also I have done nothing that they should have put me into the dungeon.’
When you read the whole story of Joseph, about him being
sold into slavery by his brothers, being put into prison, meeting people from
Pharaoh’s court, getting the opportunity to interpret his dreams, being put in
charge of Egypt’s food supply during a time of famine, and then being able to
welcome his father and brothers into Egypt during a famine, it’s hard to escape
the reality that Joseph was always in God’s place in God’s time. That’s not the
same as saying that Joseph’s path was easy. In fact, being in God’s place in
God’s time often isn’t easy, as Joseph’s life demonstrates. It can mean being
in places we don’t want to be. But despite the suffering Joseph underwent, he
was in God’s place in God’s time.
Joseph’s story is a great example of a really prominent
theme in Christianity, both in the Bible and throughout 2000 years of Christian
experiences. It shows how God often chooses to work through what many would
call coincidences, but we Christians call providences. Many Christian writers
and teachers have spoken about this. Adrian van Kaam often said that, “there are no coincidences, only
providences.” The archbishop of Canterbury (the head of the Anglican Church
world-wide) in the 1920s often said, “I
find that when I pray coincidences happen. When I cease to pray, coincidences
stop happening.” Many others talk about coincidences, preferring to call
them “God-incidences.” Experiencing God in seeming coincidences is to be a
staple of biblical and Christian experience.
I first became fascinated with the connection between
faith and God’s coincidences through the events that led me to eventually go to
seminary and become a pastor. So much of what changed me from a person who had
walked away from church to a person passionately involved in church was clearly
coincidental/providential. It felt as though I was being carried, through a set
of coincidences, into a whole new way of living life. That doesn’t mean I
always went peacefully.
Still, for a long time I wasn’t sure whether these
coincidences were just in my mind, or were something more objective—something
others experienced. Then I had an experience during my 2nd year of
being a pastor that made me realize that God often works in coincidental,
providential, and God-incidental ways with everyone who is open.
The year was 1990, and I was preaching on a particular
Sunday. As an associate pastor I generally preached about once every five to
six weeks, which made the timing of this coincidence even more interesting. In
this particular sermon I was preaching about faith, and about how real faith
gives us a sense of purpose and meaning in life. I then gave an example of what
life without faith is like. I read the congregation a passage from a book that
my wife, Diane, whom I was dating at the time, had given me. The book was titled,
The Search for Meaning, by Phillip
Berman. Berman had traveled the country, interviewing people from all walks of
life about what gave them meaning. He interviewed well-known people, as well as
those who were unknown. Each chapter of the book offers a different set of interviews
corresponding to a particular meaning perspective.
In my sermon I focused on an interview with one particular
man, a man named Elisha Shapiro. Shapiro called himself a nihilist, which means
that he didn’t believe in anything at al—not God, not meaning, not morality. Then
I read a passage from the book in which Shapiro said, “But me, I call myself a nihilist.
It’s part of my art to call myself a nihilist. There is no God, and I don’t feel like
replacing him with anything, and I like it that way. It’s a joyful experience, not an angst-filled
one. My basic belief, if you can call it
that, is that there is nothing that’s constant, whether it’s a more or ethical
tenet or whether it’s a physical law.
Take for example the statement ‘the grass is green.’ That’s not always true. Nor is the sky always blue. Maybe that’s not
true. We don’t know. Maybe it’s all a dream. I like the idea that everything that people
cling to that’s comforting or gives them a grounding is subject to change. People change, and nothing is constant….
“To
me, there really isn’t any significance to life, none whatsoever. No significance. And I find that’s a comforting thing. You’re let off the hook that way. (Laughs.) People feel
like that’s a terrible emotional deal.
But there is no significance to my existing here. I’m a product of… if I were to try to figure
out what I was a product of, the best thing I could guess would be billions of
years of coincidences, dumb luck. I
enjoy my existence as an animal organism—if I’m not just a figment of my own
imagination. If I am in existence at
all, I’m just this animal organism running by what makes it run, what
coincidentally came along with this package.”
After reading that passage, I said to the congregation
that I couldn’t understand how anyone could live this way, or how anyone could
live without a real sense of faith or meaning. I mentioned that it was a life
devoid of meaning, and therefore any kind of compassion or real sense of
service to others. I think the sermon went well.
At the end of the worship service a visitor to the
church, a woman in her mid-30s, shook my hand at the door as she dabbed away
tears. She asked if she could make an appointment with me. We agreed to meet
the following Thursday.
Thursday came and she and I sat down to talk. She said to
me, “I’ll bet you’re wondering why I had
tears in my eyes on Sunday, and why I asked to meet with you.” I told her
that the thought had crossed my mind, and that I hoped it wasn’t due to my giving
a dreadfully bad sermon. She then went on to tell me her story. She had grown
up in Southern California in a family that was part of the Four Square Gospel Church,
a fundamentalist church that was highly restrictive and regimented. Growing up,
she felt as though she was never allowed to do anything the other children were
doing, and as though she was a prisoner of her parents’ religion. She couldn’t
wait to get out from under her their control.
After graduating from high school, she met a charismatic
and dynamic man—a man who promised her freedom and a life filled with adventure
and excitement. She left home to travel with this man, along with a group of
others who seemed to be part of his entourage. They lived an exciting life of
drugs, partying, and experimentation. But then the life took a downward spiral.
The man became more and more controlling. He enticed her to dabble in all sorts
of sexual practices with other men, and he turned her into something very close
to a prostitute. She found herself trapped in a nightmare. What made it worse
was that through this lifestyle she ended up damaging some of her internal reproductive
organs, leaving her with a working ovary on the right side of her body and a working
fallopian tube on the other side. In other words, without artificial help to
get an egg across a wide cavity, she could never get pregnant.
It took her two years to escape this man’s grasp. She
moved back home and enrolled in college, majoring in psychology. After
graduating she enrolled in a master of social work program so that she could
become a counselor working with lost souls like herself. She eventually met a
man, a psychologist, whom she married. They moved around a bit as he took on
teaching jobs and worked in rehab centers. Their travels brought them to the
town where I was an associate pastor. She told me that it had taken her so long
to recover from the life with that man who had destroyed so much of her life,
and that church was something that helped her tremendously. She came to our
church looking for a place to help her continue to heal, especially when she
was beginning to obsess about her past more in recent months. She had been
praying to God to help her find a church that would help her heal.
She then leaned forward and said to me, “You can imagine my surprise when I came here
for church Sunday and you talked about Elisha Shapiro. You see, Elisha Shapiro was that man I just told
you about.” She then said that she was still living the consequences of
that life. All her life she wanted to have and raise children, but because of
her internal scarring there was no way to become pregnant naturally. Her only
option was in-vitro fertilization, especially since her husband was against
adopting children. At that time they had already spent thousands of dollars on
unsuccessful in-vitro fertilization treatments.
She eventually joined the church and became a very active
(and personally inspiring for me) member, and one of our most prayerful
members. She taught me a lot about how faith can lead to a life of
God-incidences. She taught me that my experiences weren’t unique, but were
quite common for Christians, especially as we grow deeper in our faith. But her
coincidences weren’t through. Over the years she kept trying to have children
via in-vitro, but after going through twelve or so treatments without success,
at a cost of thousands of dollars, she decided that she couldn’t do it
anymore.
She and I talked many times over the year about her
disappointment, and we even prayed for healing, but nothing seemed to work. She
was disappointed and helpless to do anything about it. For a long time we
didn’t talk about it. Then, one day, she walked into my office with a big,
ear-to-ear grin. I asked her what had happened, and she said, “I’m two months pregnant!” I said to her, “But I thought you quit the in vitros.” She said, “I
did. This was a natural pregnancy.” I
then asked her what had happened.
After jokingly asking me if she needed to give me a
lecture on the birds and the bees, she told me that about two months prior, in
the midst of despair and sadness, she sat down with God and prayed: “Lord, you know how much I want to be a mother. You know how much I’ve wanted this my whole
life. It doesn’t look like it’s going to
happen, and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. So, Lord, I give you my life. If you want me to become a mother, I will
become the best mother I can be, and I will serve you as a mother. If not, I will serve you the best I can in
whatever you call me to do. All I want
to do is to be yours, so I will follow you and serve you however you want.” She said that it must have been during that
week that she got pregnant. She was
convinced that she became pregnant because she surrendered to God and gave up
her demand that God make her pregnant. She gave up control over her life. It
was her saying to God that she was God’s no matter what, and that she was
willing to give up her dreams, that seemed to open her to God’s Spirit. Her
miracle happened because of her surrender. Seven months later she gave birth to
a healthy baby boy. Two years later, she gave birth to another healthy baby
boy. Both of these conceptions were pretty near physically impossible.
She taught me that when we have faith and pray,
coincidences, providences, and God-incidences become a regular part of our
lives. One of the reasons we’re doing this series on “Coincidence or
Providence?” is to explore what we can learn from these God-incidences. From
her I learned three really big lessons:
First, if we choose
to turn away from God and God’s way, God won’t stop us. God really does
give us freedom of choice, and the real basic freedom is whether we will choose
God’s way for us or our own way. If we choose our own way, no matter how
destructive it might be, God won’t stop us. But God will wait and watch for us,
much like the prodigal son’s father (Luke 15:11-32). The son takes his
inheritance and squanders it on an self-destructive life. But the father
watches every day for his son to return, and when he does the father runs to
embrace and restore him. This is the way God is with us. God will let us choose
a path of destruction, if that is our choice, but God also always waits to
restore us, often using coincidences to do so.
Second, when we
choose to return, God takes whatever life we give God, and makes it better.
But that doesn’t mean God will make it perfect. God won’t necessarily take away
the scars, consequences, or burdens of our bad choices and lifestyles. But God
will find a way to make our lives better, starting with where we are. And that
life will be better than anything we could imagine when we were struggling and
lost.
Third, the more we
open to God, the more God will surprise us. This is the great lesson of
God-incidences. God loves to surprise us with possibilities we didn’t know were
possible. I never imagined that becoming a pastor could be a great thing. My
friend didn’t realize that God could actually speak to her directly through a
stranger’s sermon, nor that she could get pregnant naturally despite her
prognosis.
God is also ready to surprise you,… if you are open and
ready.
Amen.
