July 21, 2024
• Rev. Mindie Moore
Life’s A Roller Coaster: The Drop
Genesis 41:46-49, 53-57
We’re back for Week 3 of our July Series, “Life’s a Roller Coaster,” where we’re looking at how our faith plays a part in the ups and downs of our lives. So far we’ve looked at the moment when we buckle up and get ready to go on the ride (aka trusting in God and acknowledging that we don’t have as much control as we’d like) and the part of the ride that makes the climb up the hill, or as I told you, my absolute least favorite part of the ride!
Today, we’re spending time in The Drop. This is when things get EXCITING. Because it’s not just the drop, but it can be going back uphill, with big twists, we might even find ourselves upside down at some point along the way.
Now, it used to be back in the days before YouTube, that what kinds of drops and rises and twists and turns you were going to experience on a roller coaster, those were kind of a mystery. Like you could sort of stare up at the roller coaster while you were waiting in line and try to predict, ok, the corkscrew comes after that hill, this part is really fast, but overall...the thing was kind of an unknown.
BUT NOW...you can watch a 4K POV video of basically every ride out there. And this is kind of awesome, especially if you have anxiety about rides. When we went to Disney this past Christmas, we watched every single POV video that they had and for the really big rides, we watched them multiple times. This was basically me trying to convince my kids to GO on all of these rides so I wouldn’t miss any of them. And when we were at the park, there were several times when we reminded them, “hey, we watched this. We know how it goes. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” And it was really helpful.
So this is an awesome resource if you’re going to a theme park. BUT...it doesn’t really help us in our real-life roller coasters. There’s no POV to tell us when the drop is going to come. There’s no way to anticipate when you might find yourself upside down. There’s just kind of the ride. We’re on it, and it’s going, and we have to figure out how to hold on and make it through.
The story from Joseph’s life that we’re looking at today is a great illustration of just how extreme some of these ups and downs can be. I actually think the majority of Joseph’s life fell into the roller coaster category. We find his story in the very first book of the Bible, in Genesis, and the account of his life takes up almost 30% of this first book! That’s a lot of real estate. So he’s got this big story, lots of detail, spanning the whole of his life...and it all kind of follows this pattern. High highs...low lows. When he’s born, he’s his father’s favorite son, born from his favorite wife...and then he ends up sold into servitude by his brothers and his dad believes he’s dead. He moves on from that to being a well-respected servant...to being thrown in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. And then he goes from imprisonment...to being the number 2 in the entire nation of Egypt.
So it is very much a roller coaster for Joseph. And that’s an important point to pay attention to because it helps us let go of what I think is a big misconception that a lot of us hold, and it’s one that can get in the way sometimes when it comes to our faith and how we connect to God. This first came to my attention a couple of years ago, when I encountered some research from the Fuller Youth Institute. And what they found as they talked to young people, from all different faith traditions, from all different parts of the country, is that the majority of people expect their lives to look something like this:
Draws a flat line with a couple small bumps.
So what MOST of us expect our lives are going to look like, is to be a majority of the time in stability. Things are calm, events are predictable. And, occasionally, there will be these drops. These things we can’t predict or control. We EXPECT that there are selective and few moments of instability in our lives.
So that’s what we THINK will happen. Here’s the problem. Our lives don’t look like that. When the researchers moved from talking about expectations to having people report on the actual events in their lives, consistently it looked a lot more like this:
Draws a bumpy line with a few spots of stability.
And so if you, like me and probably the MAJORITY of people in this room, have been told that your goal, that the ideal, is to cultivate a steady life that has as few ups and downs as possible, this research is going to cause some big problems. Because what this tells us is that if we’re chasing stability, we’re actually chasing something that is very difficult to attain. We’re chasing something that very rarely exists. So maybe (SLIDE) instead of chasing stability, we should chase connection with God to see us through these ups and downs.
That’s a huge part of what we learn from Joseph in this story.
And I’m going to tell you, at the beginning of this narrative, Joseph is kind of living the dream. He’s got the job, the economy is good, food is abundant, the drinks are flowing. I bet interest rates are low. I mean, it is the good days. 7 years of the good life.
But we know that doesn’t last forever. And so the drop happens. And now, abundance is a thing of the past. As good as the past 7 years have been, these next 7 are so hard. There’s famine all over the region, people are literally starving. It’s a bad time no matter who you are or where you look.
It would be easy to expect this story to just spiral into doom and gloom. But what’s awesome about this moment is that there’s hope. And there’s hope because of the actions that Joseph took when things were good. The text tells us that when the grain was growing, Joseph was storing it. This is not a story of someone who gets a windfall and then spends it all in a week. I mean, Joseph was paying attention. He was setting himself and the people he was responsible for up for survival if their luck ran out.
And this isn’t just a savvy business decision. This is an act of faith. I would actually say that (SLIDE) it can be a radical act of faith to stay connected to God when we’re in the high points of life. Because we see the results of how hard this can be all the time: it’s in the high, successful moments where we see people fail so often. That really famous person goes down, that megachurch pastor with a million Instagram followers has a scandal revealed, the politician in the height of their career does the thing. This is a common story because I’m not sure most of us are given the tools to navigate success particularly well, and especially not when it comes to how it intersects with our faith. In fact, it’s far too easy when things are going well, to forget our need for God. To maybe forget that we have many needs at all.
That’s why the practices we cultivate when we’re in the ups of life are so critical. Because it’s those practices that set us up to get through the lows. The practices that Joseph cultivates not only set them all up for survival when things go wrong, but they also remind him that this success is not about him. This habit of storing grain points him back to God’s role in his story and the people’s collective story. He KNOWS they are in a moment of experiencing a lot of blessing and he pays attention to that. His ability to pay attention leads him to gratitude. And that gratitude reminds him that he is dependent on God, even when it would be easy to believe that he is only dependent on himself.
What Joseph does in the 7 years of plenty gives us a great blueprint for what it looks like to stay connected to God when things are going good. It’s this simple process where we can: (SLIDE)
Notice what’s true
Find the thing to be grateful for
Allow ourselves to depend on God
I’ll give you an example of when I practiced this just the other day. If you get the St. Luke’s Rev-elations email that goes out on Fridays, I wrote the devotion this week and talked about how my family and I took a walk down Flower Alley the other night, which is just a few blocks from here. It’s this two block stretch of alleyway that people have turned into this beautiful, artistic, social space. You can take a walk there after church if you want. It’s my favorite!
So as we set out for our walk earlier this week, it felt like a really good chance to practice what I’m preaching to you today. And here’s what this looked like for me:
• Notice what’s true: we live in a walkable community that cares about beauty and the people in it.
• Find the thing to be grateful for: the benches for sitting and enjoying, the wave from a neighbor, the free tennis ball for Pepper
• Allow ourselves to depend on God: God, I want to be as aware as possible of the beauty and people around me. Help me not move at a pace where I take this stuff for granted. Let me feel joy and delight and see the ways that you work through people to create really good things in this place.
In some ways it sounds really simple. But I think if we actually would make a habit of practicing these three things on purpose in the best moments of our lives, I think we would see the impact. ESPECIALLY once we experience the drop. Especially when the routines and habits that kept us going all of a sudden are in a total freefall and we don’t know which way is up. This isn’t a complicated practice, but I think it’s incredibly powerful and connects us to God in a way that can go with us through some of the hardest times of our lives.
In fact, I would invite you to try this practice this week. You might be at the top or the bottom, but just try it. See how doing this maybe every day, or three times even, this week shifts the way you feel yourself connecting to God. It’s probably not going to be earth-shaking...that’s not the point. What we’re building here is a sustainable way to know and trust and hold on to the God who loves us, even when things fall apart.
Because, if we go back to Joseph...things were falling apart in his story. And I think, especially as we are reading this in our present moment in the world, it’s so important that we know that this is more than just a story of Joseph as an individual. This is a story of a nation. This is a story of a larger group of people who are looking around wondering what in the world they are going to do. This moment of famine is so different. It’s not the world they had known for so long. I would guess they are looking at their reality asking themselves, “how did we get here? How do we get OUT of this place? How do things change for the better?”
It’s not just a drop for Joseph personally, this is a moment of collective crisis. The text says “the whole world”! Which we know is a much more narrow segment of people than we would think of now, but still the point stands: this thing that's happening is impacting groups from all over the place, different ethnicities, practices, traditions, etc. All these people are experiencing their absolute lowest moment, collectively. And in that collectively low moment that God makes a way. (SLIDE: In our lowest moments, God makes a way.)
It’s hard to believe that God will make a way sometimes. Because fear can be pretty loud, especially when it’s a shared fear. And I think we’re going into a season, particularly around the upcoming election, where it feels like a lot and where fear is about as loud as I have ever heard it be. And I think that's true no matter WHAT your perspective is or WHO you vote for...we are in a moment where so much of how we’re receiving and processing information and acting on it is driven by deep fear. It almost seems like the drop will go on forever and it’s hard to see what the other side might look like.
We’re in what I would call a macro moment of chaos in our country. I feel it. If you’re feeling it, you’re not alone. And it’s not the most ideal place to find ourselves. But I do find hope in the fact that God has shown up in these types of places before. Through Joseph’s faithfulness, God created a way to sustain people through stores of grain. God did not leave them even when they were scared and hopeless and didn’t know what was coming next. In a very real, tangible moment of crisis, God showed up and used faithful people like Joseph to create a moment of hope.
I think God still uses faithful people to create moments of hope. I think God wants to use US to create moments of hope. And it all ties back into this idea of practices and that the things that we do to connect ourselves to our creator? Those things matter.
Kaitlyn Schiess (SLIDE) is the author of “The Liturgy of Politics: Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor” and she shared this thought the other day, which really spoke to me, and I hope there’s a word of wisdom in here for some of you too:
The next few months have the potential to warp us—making us angry and fearful, suspicious of our neighbors, ready to snap at the slightest offense. I’ve felt it in myself. The red light at an intersection lasted a little too long yesterday and after a week of tense conversations and internet criticism and scary news cycles, I thought I would burst.
We need to spend time NOW thinking about what practices of prayer, what habits of rest, what limits on media consumption, what strong relationships could help us weather this season. Because when it’s over, regardless of the outcome, we will have problems to face...we will have neighbors who need our love and service. We will have communities who need strong advocates. We will have churches who need Sunday school teachers and casserole bakers and front lawn mowers. How we choose to navigate this season now will affect how faithful we will be then.”
We don’t get to choose the ups and downs of our lives. We can’t predict them, we can’t plan our way out of them. There will always be something, whether it’s very personal or very much on a public scale that is going to throw us for a loop. So we can’t control THAT. But we CAN choose to build a foundation of being connected to God in a way that transforms us for the long haul. We can choose to cultivate a life of faith that sustains through the hardest moments. We can let ourselves be shaped by wisdom and compassion and hope. We can take the long view and know that as high as we might climb, as far as we might fall, there’s not a single place that the love of God can’t find us.
Because even when life does THIS (points to white board), stories like Joseph’s remind us that God is faithful and that creating a life that is connected to this God who loves us is work worth doing.
Let’s pray.