What “Does” God Intend?

Sunday, September 27, 2020
Pastor Mark Aune

Genesis 37:3-8, 17b-22, 50:15-21

Dear friends in Christ, grace and peace. Amen

Today is confirmation Sunday at Augustana and it is another reminder of how much our lives have changed since Covid 19 turned our world upside down.

Confirmation Sunday is a big deal at Augustana. We want it to be special, a memorable moment in the timeline of faith development for our young people to pause and reflect on what it means to be part of the church and Christian community. The 35 young adults who confess faith in Jesus today are doing something significant and it has eternal consequences.

Plus, they will have the distinction and the memory of being the first, and hopefully the last group of young people to affirm their faith in Jesus Christ in a church parking lot and not in our sanctuary.

Given how strange it really is to have our confirmation service in a parking lot, I suppose it is fitting that our bible reading for today is strange and unsettling as well. It includes the ugly underbelly of family strife and outright hatred as well as how God is present and active in the middle of this messed up family.

We meet Joseph today and even though the musical about his multicolored coat is full of good music and lyrics, it doesn’t do justice to the dark side of this family we meet in Genesis 37.

Joseph is 17 years old; the favorite of his father and his older brothers were very jealous of him. Jacob loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he had made him a long robe with sleeves.

But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably to him.

It wasn’t just the robe and Joseph’s favorite status that bugged the older brothers. Joseph was an irritating, know it all, obnoxious younger brother.

When he has a dream that foretells his older brothers bowing down to him and serving him, they hate him even more and decide to get rid of him. First, they want to kill him but, in the end, they just decide to sell him to the Midianites who take him to Egypt where he is sold again into the household of the Pharaoh.

I can’t even begin to name all the layers of disfunction and heartbreak in this story. The power in this story is how real it is to our own lives. It is easy to see ourselves in this story.

It names the struggles families go through.
It reminds us that families don’t always get along.

I can’t help but wonder if Joseph asked himself where God was in all this trauma he experienced.

Did he question the presence of God in his life?
Did he feel abandoned by God, stuck in an unending loop of misery with no end in sight?

We ask similar questions, even today. Maybe especially today.

6 months into a pandemic with no end in sight.
Daily reminders of what is lost.
Staggering numbers of death because of Covid.
Anxiety about the future as we cry out for it all to end as quickly as possible.

When I take a step back and pause for a moment, I find myself wondering and asking, what good will come out of this period in our lives?

What is God up to and what are God’s intentions in this cauldron of pandemic, politics and public health we simmer in right now?

I believe the Joseph story can help us answer some of these questions. I believe the Joseph story has something to say to 35 young people who are publicly confessing their faith in Jesus at a time in their lives when they have every right to question the presence of God in our world.

We must go to the end of the story to see what happens.

We must go to the end of the story in order to understand.

Then we have to take this Joseph story and hang on to the promises and the outcomes even as we cannot see what the outcome of our stories will be.

While Joseph’s father thinks he is dead and mourns his loss, Joseph thrives in Egypt. He faces many trials and through it all, keeps trusting God and relying on God until he is in a place where he can truly help the people of Egypt.

Then without knowing it would happen, he helps his own family. The same family that sold him into slavery.

Joseph’s brothers said, “What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?” ¹⁶So they approached Joseph, saying, “Your father gave this instruction before he died, ¹⁷‘Say to Joseph: I beg you, forgive the crime of your brothers and the wrong they did in harming you.’ Joseph wept when they spoke to him. ¹⁸Then his brothers also wept. ¹⁹But Joseph said to them, “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? ²⁰Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.

The intentions of God can be difficult to see and understand. It is nothing short of remarkable to hear Joseph’s words to his brothers.

Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.
Think about the spiritual maturity it would take to say something like that and believe it.

Joseph’s ability to even make this statement of faith is only possible because of his deep, long standing relationship with God. This kind of a relationship takes time. It takes practice. It involves being tested.

The faith these young people confess today will be different in 30 years.

Hopefully it will be stronger.

It will be deeper.

It will manifest itself in ways they cannot even begin to imagine today in this parking lot.

Perhaps they will even have a faith like Joseph’s. The ability to look back on the trials and tribulations of their life and say, even though harm was done to me, God brought good out of it.

God was always watching over Joseph, especially in the darkest moments of his life.

And because Joseph trusted God and constantly put his life in God’s hand, he grew to understand and clearly see God’s intentions instead of his own. That is a clear sign of faith.

We have that same promise. This congregation, this community has modeled that promise for our confirmands.

Seeing the good, holding on to the good when life is challenging, and you are faced with pain and difficulties is not an easy thing to do. But when we believe and trust that God’s intentions are always for good, it gives us power.

It gives us the power to say, getting confirmed in a parking lot is a cool thing and God is present right here on this asphalt and in these cars.

It gives us to power to say, I forgive you for what you have done to me and I still love you because we are family and God has brought us together.

It gives us power to keep moving forward when every day brings a new challenge and we can’t see where we are going or what the outcome will be.

But we keep moving forward, trusting God, believing in God and seeking out ways to know God better and better.

Today we rejoice in our confirmands as they take one more step into living God’s intentions. It is one of what will be many steps they will take.

You and I walk with them, and together we can see the intentions of God are good.

For that hope and promise we say thanks be to God. Amen

Past Sermons

Sermons

Mutually Encouraged by Faith

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pastor Megan Torgerson

Romans 1:1-17

The book of Romans is a letter. An actual letter. Like, a letter written by hand and then sent to someone else for them to read. Paul, the author of this letter, wrote a lot of letters. Paul was an apostle, that is, someone who is sent – in this case, he is one who is sent to preach the good news of Jesus Christ to the furthest reaches of the known world. He’s really, really good at it.

At the time that Paul writes this letter to the church in Rome, he’s been doing this work for probably twenty years and is at the peak of his career. He’s developed a great pattern in his work: visit a place, get to know the people, continually share his faith with them, help gather a community of believers from all walks of life, and stay with them while they learn how to be followers of Jesus. Then Paul leaves – after all, he’s got other places to visit and more people to teach. He is an apostle – he is sent. But he doesn’t leave the church abandoned. He writes letters back to these churches, especially when he hears about crises or conflicts. Sometimes they need comfort, sometimes challenge, sometimes critique, but always he writes as one they know and love. They welcome his input.

The letter to the Romans is not like that. Paul has never been to Rome. There is already a Christian church there, one brought over likely from Jerusalem very early in the faith. And the church in Rome has recently seen conflict. A few years before the writing of this letter, the Roman emperor expelled all the Jews from Rome. Because Christianity was effectively a form of Judaism at the time, Christians were also exiled. After the emperor died and the Jewish Christians returned, they found a church that had continued to grow and develop – this time with Gentile Christians.

It’s hard for us to understand how shocking and despicable this would have been. Two weeks ago I preached on Acts 10, and how Peter’s vision of God calling all animals clean and good to eat flew in the face of millennia of culture, history, and society for Jewish Christians. Jesus himself was Jewish and kept these laws – surely if anyone else wanted to be Christian, they could likewise follow these rules. Peter’s vision and the general movement of the church revealed otherwise.

That didn’t mean it made things easy. It is hard to let go of tradition and expectation and legislation as the Spirit moves us to new places. I hear people struggle when someone sits in their pew or wears sweatpants to church. Let’s be honest: those are enormously trivial things. If still we grind our teeth at the thought of these worthless infractions how much more might faithful people be driven to despair by moving on from the purity laws ordained by God?

This is the faith community to which Paul writes. He writes to a church redefining and fighting. It is a church that feels a deep rift, a painful split, one that goes deep into matters of identity and righteousness, one that threatens to dissolve into name-calling and condemning and finger-pointing and disgrace to the very name of God in whose name they mean to gather – and if we’re honest, we know how that feels. Those fears are not unfamiliar.

So how does Paul start his letter? He has no standing in that church in Rome. They don’t even know who he is – and if they do, it’s possible that they might still remember him as he was in his youth, an aggressive persecutor of the early faith. What can he say that would possibly invite them to listen to him, to hear the word he will share, to receive the message that he hopes will join them together in the work of the gospel?

He keeps it simple: he tells them the truth. He tells them who he is, and it is fully wrapped up in who Jesus is. His self-introduction is the story of the gospel. Nothing he can say about himself means more than who he is in Jesus Christ.

He tells them he wants to come see them, that he wants to be with them, that he hopes he can share some spiritual gift – but even more than that, so that they might mutually encourage each other in faith. He doesn’t want to come to them because he’s better than them, because he can fix them so they can get things right, because they’re obviously sinful mess-ups who just haven’t been taught the truth. No, he wants to join them for mutual encouragement in faith. He wants to walk with them. He hopes he has something to offer them in his teaching and leadership, but just the same, he knows he will grow by being with them as well.

What if that’s how it’s supposed to be? What if we’re supposed to talk about what we believe and why, not because we’ve got it right and we want to establish our superior knowledge, but because we know that God works through our mutual encouragement in faith? What if we were not ashamed of the gospel, not afraid of getting it wrong, not worried that someone would think we were weird for talking about what we believe and why and then asking others the same? What if we trusted that the power of God was at work in this mutual encouragement? What if we were not so proud and short-sighted as to think that the way we see God is the only way God works in the world? What if we actually believed that God is at work in the world, that God has already been working long before we showed up, that we arrive as much to learn as to teach?

Ah, but I know the argument against it: we’re supposed to keep polite conversation, right? What don’t you talk about at the dinner table? Religion and politics, right? Look where it’s gotten us. It’s gotten us to a place where we can no longer have civil discourse, where we are more likely to condemn than to seek to understand, where we claim a Christian can only look one way, live one place, vote one direction, take one moral position. It’s gotten us built up and walled off and fighting against our own beloved members of the family of God.

So don’t do it. Take Paul’s example. Tell people who you are. Tell them where you’re from. Tell them what you believe. And then invite them to do the same. Make your story of faith as natural a part of your introduction as where you work and where you live and who’s in your family. And when someone’s story is different, listen to it. Hear it. See God at work in it. Be amazed. Allow for the mutual encouragement of faith, because this is how the gospel is shared.

No matter where you go from here, no matter where you find yourself, no matter what comes next for you – you can do this. You are called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel which is the power of God for salvation for everyone who has faith – no matter what. Thanks be to God. Amen.

What “Does” God Intend?

Sunday, September 27, 2020
Pastor Mark Aune

Genesis 37:3-8, 17b-22, 50:15-21

Past Sermons

Belonging Begins with . . . Showing Up for Each Other

Belonging Begins with . . . Intentional Hospitality

A Word for Worriers and Workaholics

Sermons

Mutually Encouraged by Faith

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pastor Megan Torgerson

Romans 1:1-17

Past Sermons

Belonging Begins with . . . Showing Up for Each Other

Belonging Begins with . . . Intentional Hospitality

A Word for Worriers and Workaholics

About Augustana

Quick Links

Contact Us

Worship Hours

What “Does” God Intend?

Sunday, September 27, 2020 Pastor Mark Aune

Genesis 37:3-8, 17b-22, 50:15-21

Past Sermons

Sermons

Mutually Encouraged by Faith

Sunday, May 19, 2019 Pastor Megan Torgerson

Romans 1:1-17

Past Sermons

About Augustana

Quick Links

Contact Us

Worship Hours

Sunday, September 27, 2020
Pastor Mark Aune

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pastor Megan Torgerson