Fool Me Twice...

 Read Genesis 44

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, shame on me.

The saying emerged in the English and Scottish cultures about 500 years ago.  It means if you are out to deceive me, that’s all on you. That’s about who you are. If you are a deceiver, then shame on you.

But if you fool me once and I didn’t learn the lesson, then that’s on me. I am expected to learn from my life experience.

Solomon thought it appropriate to pass on godly, life experiences, mostly in the Proverbs.  We should learn from our life experiences.  The wise learn from the shared experience of others. If we don’t, then shame on us.

So, 11 brothers departed Joseph’s household with bags full of grain.  Of the 11, 10 had done this drill before, but not one of them said, “Let’s inspect our loads before we head out.  Remember what happened last time.”

We can discuss the reasons why Joseph had his cup put in Benjamin’s bag ad naseum, but at least 1 of the 10 older brothers should have had the wherewithal to say, “Hold your horses—ok donkeys—we are not going anywhere until we check the contents of our bags.”

It’s as if they were the forerunners of TSA.  Did anyone put anything in your bag that you don’t know about?

How do you answer that other than no?  How do I know if I don’t know?

My formative political years were the Reagan years.  The United States and the Soviets were mutually reducing the number of nuclear warheads we had.  Each country would self-report, but Reagan had this policy of trust, but verify.

As a Marine officer, it was essential to trust your Marines.  You trusted but you also inspected.

My point is that these knuckleheads should have inspected their loads before they left. But they didn’t and so Joseph was able to have his brothers returned to him once again without having to reveal himself to them.

That revelation was coming soon, but for now, it appears he was wondering how they would treat their youngest brother.  Joseph knew how they treated him.  Were these the same men they were 2 decades ago?

Apparently, there had been some remorse.  As we will examine in the next service, they were not fully repentant, but they did care greatly for Benjamin, if only because they knew how the loss of him would devastate their father.

This whole cup in the sack ploy moves the story along faster than if the 11 brothers returned home and didn’t come back until they ran out of food again, and they would have run out again.  The famine would last 7 seven years.

Joseph had seen his brother Benjamin, but he also wanted to see his father.  What had his father been thinking all of this time? His brothers had not revealed to Joseph the story they concocted and told their father after they sold him into slavery. There is more to come, but for now, let’s keep it simple and relevant only to this part of the story.

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, shame on me.

We are people of forgiveness but we are also people of wisdom.  We must learn from our life experiences.

We will talk about repentance in the next service, but for now, let’s talk experience and growth.

If we want to fulfill our commission and make disciples and teach people, we need to learn from our life experiences and be able to help others in their life experiences.

If you repeat the same mistakes over and over at your job, you might need to find a new job.

If you forget to change the oil in your car every 3000 or 5000 miles—some of these new vehicles don’t need oil changes as frequently—but if you keep forgetting, you might be needing a new vehicle.

If you forget to charge your phone overnight, you might have to talk to people face to face.

These 10 brothers needed to be a bit gullible to move the story along in the way we know it.  We don’t.

Most of the time when I pray with teachers or students, I ask God to grant those coming to learn a teachable spirit.  We need that disposition as well.

Jesus tells us to take his yoke and learn from him.  That learning often begins in our life experience.

So today, the thought that I send you out with is this.  Lord, grant us a teachable spirit.  Help us to learn so that we may better serve you and love our neighbors.

Amen.

Not quite to Repentance

 Read Genesis 44

For those who have been reading faithfully as we journey through Genesis, you might think that this all sounds familiar.

Putting silver back in the grain sacks—that’s not the first time this has happened.  You might think that these brothers would inspect their load before departing the premises.  Evidently not!

The story of Jacob—now called Israel—and his 12 sons is told with a few key parts left out.  Those parts involved Joseph. The parts about Benjamin and one son presumed dead are included, but not the wickedness that went with selling their brother and deceiving their father.

But something has been brewing among the brothers.  There was a sense of wrongdoing lording itself over them; yet, confession was elusive.  True repentance had not yet come.

They realize that what they did to Joseph was wrong but they seem to ignore the fact that they have been living a lie with their father for all of these years.

They were standing before, mostly bowing before, Joseph.  Remember the dream where 11 bowed before Joseph.  That was manifest with only 10 brothers bowing up to this point.  Now with Benjamin present, the dream had been fully manifested.

Joseph is the architect of this encounter. He doesn’t seem to want to wait until his brothers run out of food again to bring everything to light.  We don’t quite get there in this chapter, but things are moving in that direction.

It seemed that Joseph hoped to see remorse and regret in the 10 brothers who wronged him.  Surely, Joseph wanted to embrace Benjamin as the only brother innocent of what the others did. 

It’s a strange irony that Joseph had Benjamin—the only innocent party here—framed as the thief of his personal cup. But this accelerated the story’s advance.

Judah offered to stand in Benjamin’s place, pleading with Joseph about how losing Benjamin would devastate his father, not knowing that this was the man’s father as well.

Where does that bring us?  Let’s look at this in terms of sin, of transgressions.

The 10 brothers had sinned against Joseph.  That was a heavy burden that they bore. It surely was on their minds.

The 10 brothers had sinned against their own father.  That was something that they had not had to deal with up to this point.

The 10 brothers had sinned against God.  They knew that they were not in right standing with God.  They thought that they were due some divine punishment. That could be what was happening in all this cup and silver in the sacks business.

The brothers knew they did wrong but were not yet ready to repent.  Repentance is a tough thing.  Yes, they tore their clothing when the cup was found with Benjamin.  They knew the ritual.

They had not yet fully confessed their wrongdoing. They had contempt for their brother.  They hated their brother and wanted to kill him.  They sold their brother into slavery.  They lied to their father about their brother’s fate.  They were clever about this allowing Jacob to draw his own conclusions, but they were fully complicit in the blood covered shredded garment that they presented to their father.

They were still far from repentance, but they were closing in on it. They could no longer ignore what they had done but they were dragging their feet as far as actual repentance was concerned.

God was using Joseph to bring his father’s entire family into Egypt where they would prosper and grow for many years.  They would later be enslaved for many more but God had told Abram that part long ago. God was using Joseph for his purpose with a people whom he would call his own.

So, what about us?  The story continues in what must seem like baby steps to us, but it continues nonetheless.  But what do we take from this and apply to our lives?

Repentance!

To repent is to turn away from our sinful ways and seek the ways of God.  That’s the simple definition. Actually, it is a simplistic definition.

The fuller explanation is necessary if we truly want to be penitent people.  We not only turn away from sin, but we leave our sinful heart, mind, body, and soul behind. We leave all of our junk behind and we are not coming back for it.

We don’t take our sinful ways to the pawn shop and get a claim ticket for later.  We are not coming back to our sinful selves again. We give it all up and seek God.

It is a wholesale exchange.  Easy peasy, right?

Just as the 10 brothers didn’t quite realize the full extent of their sin and sinful nature, neither do we. John Calvin would call this the total depravity of humankind.  That sounds harsh.

It means that sin has tarnished every person, every soul.  No one is left untouched by sin.

Emotionally, we might be ready to repent, but mentally, we are still thinking in the ways of the world.

Mentally, we might be ready to repent, but physically our bodies are addicted to things of the world.

Physically, we are ready to submit our bodies to the discipline prescribed by the Lord, but spiritually, we remain adrift in the world.

Like I said, easy peasy.

Life can be tough. It’s tougher when we claim to have given up sin but know we are holding on to some things too hard to let go of. We often choose to ignore it.

I forgive you. I will love one another. I will be a light in the world, but you cut me off in traffic and you are getting a selected finger or a 9mm depending on how far down the road I want to follow you in anger.

I forgive you but you are still sitting over there at the outcast table.  I remember what you did.  Ain’t gonna be no reconciliation. You go sit with the lepers.

I am a new creation but I’ve still got a good right hook from the old one so watch out if we butt heads.

I will worship God in the assembly, unless it gets in the way of sports, fundraisers, the Twilight Zone marathon, or cutting the grass.

This repentance business isn’t for sissies. No wimps! It’s hard to let go of old ways even when we want to embrace the ways of the Lord.

Letting go of the ways of the world is tough stuff.

Think about while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.  We deserved wrath—punishment delivered with anger.  We received love that we call mercy and grace.

When the woman brought before Jesus for adultery found herself standing alone with Jesus and no one left to condemn her, Jesus said now go and sin no more. He didn’t add easy peasy.

Today’s Christians often find themselves frustrated and not realizing the fullness of life that Jesus promised.  Why?

Too often we want grace without repentance. We want forgiveness without having to repent of our sin.  We want Jesus to forgive us of our sins but we want him to bless us while remaining in our sin.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer would call this cheap grace. 

We live in a world where lukewarm Christianity is within the acceptable norm. Just chill.  You got your salvation.  Quit making waves.

We live in a world where many Christians believe we are to conform to the patterns of the world. Just get in step and quit rocking the boat.

We live in a world where it is difficult to distinguish the Christian from the Christian Tourist.

What is a Christian Tourist?

Christian Tourist.  One who checks out the sights of Christianity but decides that discipleship doesn’t fit into their comfort zone.  See also armchair Christian, sidelines commentator, and salt without saltiness.

You won’t find that one in your dictionaries—yet!  I came up with it a dozen years ago.

Some of you like math and science.  I’m not sure where this fits in, perhaps it’s physics.  What two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time?

Discipleship and comfort!

OK, you won’t find that in your traditional physics books, but there is truth in the statement.

We all have a comfort zone but we as Christians should all have some discomfort in our comfort zones.  That brings us to the second part of repentance—seeking God and his kingdom and his righteousness above all things.

The only way that we can truly be comfortable in our comfort zones is if they are always moving towards God.

We live in a world that wants mercy, grace, forgiveness, and blessing without repentance.  We want to hold onto some of the ungodly stuff.  Some already know that dog don’t hunt.

We know that salvation is a gift.  We didn’t earn it.  We didn’t score a 90% on the Law of Moses test.  We didn’t even score a 60%.  Salvation is the gift of God that comes by faith.  Saved by grace through faith are the words that we know.

There is something that we might call the fullness of our salvation.  I most often call it our discipleship.  In that discipleship, we discover that repentance was not a one-and-done event.  It seems like it should have been, but the old creature that we were wants his job back.

We are to leave the junk behind—all of it—and then seek God.  Seeking God while bringing our ungodly junk with us gives us nothing but frustration.

We see 10 frustrated brothers bowing before Joseph.  They knew they did their brother wrong.  Not one of them had mentioned how they continued to do wrong through this ongoing deceit of their father. They knew or at least had a sense that they had sinned against God, but they had not yet come to this state of repentance.

These encounters with Joseph, whom they still did not recognize, were drawing them closer. It seems like they are dragging their feet, but they are getting there. We will follow the story to the end but for now, we are called to examine ourselves.

Are we still holding on to things of the world?

Do we still crave sinful things?

Do we truly believe that abundance comes in Christ alone or do the sinners really get the best of everything?

Have we truly forgiven as Christ has forgiven us?

Are we content to let the word of God judge the thoughts and attitudes of the heart or do we think we need to spend some time in the judgment seat to address what God missed?

Are we finally ready to leave all of our junk behind and seek God? We can’t really do this until we take inventory of all our junk.

If any of you are familiar with 12 Step programs for overcoming addiction, then you know the 4^th step.  It is to conduct a searching and fearless inventory of ourselves.

Nobody can do this and remain in their comfort zone.  Nobody really wants to know ourselves that well.  This isn’t a natural thing, at least it’s not natural to our sinful human nature.

While we may recognize those things that are obviously sinful, we choose to ignore the more subtle ones and grow comfortable with them.

But if we are ever to know true abundance, reconciliation, and joy, we must know what junk we need to get rid of, confess, and receive God’s pardon.  He stands ready to forgive.

Are we ready to confess? Are we ready to repent?

We will take a time of silent confession before we conclude this service.  Some are uncomfortable with silence but you need to grow more comfortable with the conversation involving only you and God.  Your spirit is designed to communicate with God’s Spirit.  It’s in the specs.

Following our confessions, I will remind you of the assurance of God’s promise to forgive, and then we will affirm our faith.

For now, let us prepare to confess everything in our lives that is keeping us from seeking God.

Amen.