Trinity Episcopal Church

Trinitarian August 8th, 2010 

It's a little longer this time. 

All this week many of us have participated in Vacation Bible School. Several volunteers and about 50 kids met each night to do projects and play games and meet Joseph (played by yours truly) who tells them his story of betrayal, hardship and faith. Do you remember the story? Joseph’s brothers beat him up, threw him into a pit, sold him to a caravan passing by, then deceived his father. Joseph ended up in Potiphar’s house, whose wife made advances on him but he ran away. So the wife lied and Joseph ended up in prison for two years until he interpreted a dream for Pharaoh who appointed him second in command over all Egypt. That’s the Genesis story---thus the first soap opera was born.

One night at VBS, as I played Joseph in charge of Egypt, I was telling the kids how angry I was at my brothers: “Do you know what they did? They ripped off my coat of many colors and threw me down a well, then sold me as a slave, and I was imprisoned for two years!” The kids watched and listened intently. I continued, “I’m so mad at them---how would you feel, what would you do?” And one precocious little girl spoke out and said, “GET OVER IT!” We all laughed.

Perhaps, when it comes to faith, there is some truth in that little girl’s advice “Get over it!” Faith really spends little time in the past, fuming over all the bad things that happened to you. We can spend our whole lives bitterly complaining about what happened back then and throwing continual “Whys?” up to God. We don’t understand everything we experience in life. We can’t always make sense out of the senseless events that challenge us in life.

Faith helps us move on. Faith helps us “get over it.” Faith focuses on the now! Right now God is good (even if my circumstances are not good). Right now God is with me; right now God is sharing what I am feeling, and somehow God will bring good in the end (the theological word for that is redeem). I may not see it, but I believe it (Hebrews 11:1).

In India, to trap a monkey, the hunter cuts a hole in a gourd just big enough for the monkey’s hand to fit inside. Then the hunter places a sweet, hard cookie in the gourd and ties it to a tree. The monkey comes up, sees the cookie in the gourd, reaches inside and grabs on to the cookie. But what the monkey finds out is that he can’t bring the cookie through the hole. It’s too big to fit. The monkey must either leave the cookie and run or be placed in a bag and lose his freedom forever. Most monkeys don’t let go of the cookie.

The same is true with us. When we hold on to the past, when we clasp those adverse events that have somehow, in a psychological way, become sweet to hold over the years, we become trapped; we lose our freedom to be who God wants us to be. The real issue; the real question is who are you right now? Because the way you live this moment is the way you live your life.