Congregational Church of Brookfield (UCC)
Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost
August 10, 2008
"Left Turns Only"
Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28
Confirmand Chris Fragomeli suggested today’s sermon title, “Left Turns Only,” and at first I thought it would be fun – it made me think of a traffic sign. But then I realized that you’d probably never see that sign on a road, at least not in the United States. When you drive on the right side of the road you’re more likely to PROHIBIT left turns, to keep the traffic flow going. And then I was in Manhattan, driving south on the West Side Highway, and I thought, “NOW I might see that sign.” But it turns out New York drivers are smart enough to figure out they can’t turn right into the Hudson River, so nobody had to put up signs. But still, there’s something about big-city traffic that teaches an important spiritual lesson about control – or at least, our human lack of it.
You know that out-of-control feeling you get in heavy traffic? Whether you’re dead-stopped in gridlock or zipping along bumper-to-bumper at top speed too fast to catch your exit – either way you’re late, and your life is undoubtedly, indisputably, irrevocably out of your control. There’s a place like that in San Francisco that my friends and I used to like to call “The Land of No Left Turns,” and I toured it for the first time accidentally after missing a tiny exit over to the Golden Gate National Seashore, where my friend the park ranger was hosting a dinner party. I’d just crossed the Golden Gate Bridge going north, and when I saw I’d missed her exit, I just took the next exit, turned around, and came back from the other way. But then, the traffic into the city was too much and I couldn’t change lanes and somehow I flew by the same exact exit in the opposite direction, and I had nothing else to do but go BACK south across the bridge. I even had to stop and pay the toll! But from there I had to go south, back into San Francisco on 19th Avenue. After a long tunnel, where of course I couldn’t turn around, the first place to turn left said, “No Left Turn.” No problem, I thought. Try the next street. Again, “No Left Turn.” Maybe the next? “No Left Turn.” Fine, I thought, I’ll go just a couple more blocks. I didn’t know at the time that I was lost in the “Land of No Left Turns.” Now there’s a nice, friendly sign there: “No Left Turn Next 3 Miles.” But I was nearly back to the street where I lived before I gave up all hope and did a right-right-right to get back to the way I’d come. Sometimes, you know, having faith can be a curse!
But what does city traffic have to do with the story Joseph and his jealous brothers? Well, most of us are lucky enough to have kin who don’t try to sell us into slavery. But if we’ve lived long enough, most of us HAVE had days when our lives were undoubtedly, indisputably, irrevocably out of control. We wanted to go right, but all the signs read, “Left Turns Only.” We woke up to who’s really in charge of our lives, and – Surprise! It’s not us. There’s a great bumper sticker that says, “If God is your co-pilot, then you’d better change seats.” Some days we just plain have no other choice.
Have you ever had the bottom drop out of your life? Your gut feels like you’re on one of those carnival “Tower of Terror” rides. That’s when you hear words you never wanted to hear, like, “Honey, it’s over. I want a divorce.” Or “I think you’d better sit down. There’s been an accident.” Or what Joseph’s father heard that day: “I’m sorry, sir, but your son is dead.” My mom said she felt her stomach plummet down toward some bottomless pit the day she and my dad heard the doctor say, “I’m sorry, Allene, but there’s really nothing more we can do. With Alzheimers, medication can slow the progress of the disease, but your brain is slowly dying.” When there’s nothing more to be done, sometimes the ONLY thing that can be done is cling to the one whose steadfast love will never fail us, the Lord who made us and who will one day take us home to himself. That’s what my family learned over those 7 terrible years between my mom’s diagnosis and death. That’s what Joseph learned over the long years that began that one hot day he spent in the pit with no water, the day the traveling slavers came for him.
At first glance today’s text is a depressing story, where the worst of human nature wins out and a young man’s life – with all its shining potential – is thrown away. But I think Joseph was fortunate, in a way, at 17 to learn some valuable life lessons early. The only thing more frightening than a teenager who believes he or she is invincible or infallible is a full-grown adult who believes that. It’s important to learn early that you can’t count on fortune to always smile on you. It’s important to learn you can’t count on the whole world to love you like your doting daddy does. And getting flung down into the very bottom of the pit, like landing yourself somehow in “The Land of No Left Turns,” can teach you a lot about who has the real power to pull up out of it again.
It’s like the lesson the author of Psalm 30 learned. “I will extol you, O Lord,” he says, “for you have drawn me up, and did not let my foes rejoice over me. O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and … you brought up my soul from Sheol, [you] restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.” You may not know Psalm 30 the way you know some other verses you memorized in Sunday School – Psalm 23 “The Lord is my shepherd,” or Psalm 100, “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord!” But I think everyone should know Psalm 30, and the story of Joseph, because some days life hits you with nothing but sharp left turns that leave you breathless and bleeding at the bottom of a ditch. You know, it’s one thing to shout “Make a joyful noise to the Lord!” on a great day of celebration; it’s another thing entirely to shout those words UP from the bottom of the pit when we’re cast down. In fact, some days it takes an Olympic leap of faith to get to the end of Psalm 100 to say, “The Lord is good; his steadfast love endures for ever.”
And yet that is the very cry, the defiant cry that lifted up our ancestors, the cry of faith that kept them afloat in their small boats as they crossed the storm-tossed sea to this new continent. “The Lord is good,” let us shout into the wind and rain. “The Lord is good; his steadfast love endures for ever, and his faithfulness to all generations.” No matter what came their way, they still rose to their feet in this very Meetinghouse to proclaim this deep truth of their faith, the same Word of the Lord that upheld Joseph no doubt through years of bondage, “The Lord is good; his steadfast love endures for ever, and his faithfulness to all generations.”
When you stop to think about it, that’s the very heart and purpose of worship, as I said last week – the faithful practice of a discipline of praise. The Good News of God’s Grace teaches us that the Lord will surely lift us up and out of the pit; but it never hurts to develop a little upper body strength, right? We don’t come here because we’re better than other people; we come because we know we need help to strengthen our faith. With Holy Spirit in a loving community, we can find the way God is steering us – and when life takes a sudden, sharp left turn, we can learn to lean into it and keep going.
I want to close with the story of a girl who came into my Junior High Youth Group years ago from a life that had been careening way out of her control, her whole life long. Her mother had medicated herself with alcohol to kill the pain of a marriage to a man who beat her, and the noise of her small children crying. Terri and her younger sisters had been taken away from their parents and separated from each other by child protective services, and at the time, Terri thought it was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Her new foster mother was a saint of my church, and when she brought Terri, angry and defiant, to her first Sunday at youth group, she almost immediately got into a screaming, hair-pulling kick-boxing match with another girl whom, she said, had “looked at her funny.” It was the beginning of what was to be a beautiful friendship, but you could imagine how hard it was to think of it that way at the time – as I sat with her staring sullenly at me that night across the church office.
By that winter, she was at least peacefully co-existing with the youth group, but she was very different from most of our Berkeley kids – many of them the children of professors. Terri was born dirt poor in a trailer in California’s Central Valley and she had a hard time fitting in. But that winter, she went on our annual Snow Retreat, and during one of our fireside word games, she was given a clue, “It’s a vowel.” “What’s a vowel?” she said, and the room fell dead silent – which if you know Junior Highs, is a rare and unsettling phenomenon. But before anyone could start to laugh, I just jumped in and started explaining it to her – the mysteries of vowels and consonants that most of our kids had learned in kindergarten. “Oh,” she said, “Cool.” But the other kids talked to me about it later – “We never knew,” they said. “We had no idea.” They saw it then. They saw how Terri, like Joseph, was taken captive to a strange foreign land, and they started treating her like the child of God that she was born to be. And she came to flourish, and to grow and to change, until the girl nobody thought had a hope of finishing high school, much less staying out of state prison, finished high school, finished college, married, had babies, and began a career as, of all things, an English teacher.
May all churches be places where spirits can be lifted up out of the pit when they have become cast down in bondage. May all churches be places where wounds can be bound up and souls can be healed. May all churches be places where dreamers can dream and in the company of other seekers, meaning can be made. May all churches be places where God leads us in the dance of life – even if it makes us a little dizzy sometimes when we find ourselves spinning in the place of “left turns only.” For we know we can trust the one who loves us to hold us steady and guide us on the way.
Thanks be to God for this Good News. Amen.
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08/16/2008 08:45 PM.