Clyde Fant - "When Faith Lives in Egypt" (September 24, 2000)

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-	The second reading, the gospel lesson,	0:09
	is from the Gospel According to St. Mark, 9:30-37.	0:11
	"They went on from there and passed through Galilee.	0:19
	"He did not want anyone to know it,	0:23
	"for he was teaching his disciples,	0:26
	"saying to them,	0:28
	"'The son of man is to be betrayed into human hands,	0:31
	"'and they will kill him,	0:35
	"'and three days after being killed,	0:37
	"'he will rise again.'	0:40
	"But they did not understand what he was saying,	0:43
	"and were afraid to ask.	0:46
	"Then they came to Capernaum.	0:49
	"And when he was in the house, he asked them,	0:51
	"'What were you arguing about on the way?'	0:55
	"But they were silent.	0:58
	"For on the way, they had argued with one another	1:01
	"about who was the greatest.	1:04
	"Jesus sat down, called the 12, and said to them,	1:08
	"'Whoever wants to be first	1:13
	"'must be last of all, and servant of all.'	1:14
	"Then he took a little child and put it among them.	1:20
	"And taking it in his arms, he said to them,	1:24
	"'Whoever welcomes one such child in my name,	1:29
	"'welcomes me,	1:34
	"'and whoever welcomes me, welcomes not me,	1:37
	"'but the one who sent me.'"	1:43
	This is the word of the Lord.	1:46
-	A few words from the 47th chapter of Genesis.	2:07
	"So Joseph went in and told Pharaoh,	2:12
	"'My father and my brother,	2:16
	"'with their flocks and herds and all that they possess,	2:19
	"'have come from the land of Canaan.	2:22
	"'They are now in the land of Goshen.'	2:25
	"Then Joseph brought in Jacob, his father,	2:28
	"and set him before Pharaoh.	2:32
	"And Jacob blessed Pharaoh.	2:35
	"And Pharaoh said to Jacob, 'How old are you, old man?'	2:39
	"And Jacob said to Pharaoh,	2:45
	"'The days of the years of my sojourning	2:49
	"'are 130 years.	2:52
	"'Few and evil have been the days of my life,	2:55
	"'and they have not attained to the days	2:57
	"'of the years of the life of my father's	3:00
	"'in the days of their sojourning.'	3:03
	"And Jacob blessed Pharaoh,	3:06
	"and went out from the presence of Pharaoh.	3:09
	"And when the time drew near that Israel must die,	3:15
	"he called his son Joseph and said to him,	3:20
	"'If now I have found favor in your sight,	3:24
	"'put your hand under my thigh,	3:27
	"'and promise to deal loyally and truly with me.	3:30
	"'Do not bury me in Egypt,	3:33
	"'but let me lie with my fathers.	3:39
	"'Carry me out of Egypt,	3:41
	"'and bury me in their burying place.'	3:45
	"He answered, 'I will do as you have said.'	3:48
	"And he said, 'Swear to me.'	3:53
	"And he swore to him.	3:56
	"And Israel bowed himself upon the head of his bed,	3:59
	"and he died."	4:05
	Now Jacob has come to the end of his life.	4:12
	He wrestled against his family and lost,	4:18
	but he wrestled against God and he won.	4:23
	He began his life as a shrewd manipulator.	4:29
	He was the Gordon Gecko of the Old Testament.	4:33
	He stole his birthright,	4:39
	but ultimately he loses.	4:42
	He is afraid of Esau,	4:45
	he is cheated by Laban,	4:48
	he is tricked by his sons.	4:50
	But all the way,	4:54
	somehow, he was led	4:57
	by the promises of God.	4:59
	Now he is in Egypt.	5:02
	His son is a powerful official.	5:04
	He is in charge of the grain,	5:07
	and there is no more important job in Egypt,	5:11
	not even war, than raising grain.	5:15
	But Jacob's eyes still	5:21
	on the promise	5:23
	of the mysterious God with whom he wrestled.	5:25
	Therefore, though Jacob is in Egypt,	5:31
	Egypt is never in Jacob.	5:37
	The two scenes that I read to you	5:42
	this morning, very briefly,	5:44
	show us Jacob as an old man,	5:47
	shortly before his death,	5:51
	in the court of Pharaoh,	5:53
	the most powerful man on earth.	5:57
	But does Jacob ask a favor of the Pharaoh?	6:03
	In fact, this old Bedouin blesses the Pharaoh.	6:09
	Can you imagine a more amazing scene?	6:17
	Recently, I have traveled to Egypt on several occasions.	6:22
	We'll be going back again in January.	6:27
	And you have only to glimpse	6:32
	the ruins of the temples of Egypt,	6:35
	and the marvelous paintings of the tombs,	6:38
	and the amazing artifacts in the Cairo Museum	6:43
	to understand what I mean when I say it is amazing indeed	6:48
	to think of an old Bedouin	6:54
	blessing a Pharaoh.	6:57
	Then the scene on his deathbed.	7:02
	He calls Joseph and his sons and their sons about him,	7:05
	and the old man blesses all of them,	7:12
	and commits them also to the promises of God.	7:17
	And he makes Joseph promise	7:22
	that he will not bury him in Egypt,	7:26
	but he will take him	7:29
	to the land of his fathers,	7:32
	in fulfillment of God's promise.	7:35
	From a historical standpoint,	7:41
	there are many, many fascinating things about this story.	7:43
	But what do these scenes	7:48
	say to Israel?	7:52
	Why did Israel retain these	7:55
	relatively insignificant scenes	7:58
	within the Scripture?	8:02
	Why do these scenes remain a beacon	8:05
	for Israel to follow the promises of God?	8:10
	All the way from Egypt	8:14
	to the Holocaust,	8:18
	and the persecutions in numerous countries,	8:22
	and the discriminations in many countries,	8:25
	as they followed the promise of God.	8:30
	More than that, what can these scenes,	8:36
	so ancient, though interesting,	8:38
	say to a university chapel audience	8:42
	in the year of our Lord, 2000?	8:46
	What they say to me is,	8:53
	sooner or later,	8:56
	faith will live in Egypt.	8:59
	Some of us grew up in Canaan,	9:04
	with the blessings of Canaan,	9:09
	and the faith of our fathers.	9:12
	Some of us grew up in Egypt,	9:17
	surrounded by the gods of Egypt.	9:21
	But all of us,	9:28
	whether we grew up in a land sacred or secular,	9:30
	all of us grew up surrounded by household gods.	9:36
	Gods worshiped by our families.	9:43
	There are no families in this country	9:46
	that do not worship.	9:50
	There are no families in this country	9:51
	that do not have gods.	9:54
	There are not families in this country	9:59
	that do not have sacred scriptures,	10:02
	sacred or secular, burned upon their hearts,	10:06
	and we all grew up in such temples,	10:10
	surrounded not only by our parents but by our peers.	10:15
	And so we worship.	10:21
	We do it all day long.	10:25
	Not simply on Sunday in a marvelous cathedral such as this.	10:28
	All day long, we are followers of a promise.	10:33
	But what promise?	10:38
	If we have grown up in Canaan,	10:41
	eventually our simple faiths	10:43
	find us in Egypt,	10:46
	surrounded by splendors	10:50
	and superstitions	10:53
	never heard, or seen.	10:56
	By prosperities and pressures never imagined.	10:59
	By slogans never heard.	11:07
	And many and many kneel down before them.	11:12
	And then those of us	11:18
	whose homeland is truly Canaan,	11:21
	learn whether or not our faith	11:25
	can survive Egypt.	11:28
	True, sometimes Egypt means persecutions and pressures.	11:33
	Like the slavery of the slime pits of Egypt,	11:39
	or the smokestacks of the Holocaust.	11:45
	But you and I are not in much danger	11:53
	from foreign gods these days,	11:55
	nor religious persecution, thank God.	11:58
	But we may be seduced	12:03
	by the treasures of Egypt.	12:07
	Sometimes, a time of hardship	12:12
	may strengthen faith.	12:16
	Israel always remembered the wilderness	12:18
	as a time of their childhood,	12:22
	holding the hand of God like a little child,	12:26
	wandering in the wilderness.	12:29
	And so the prophets looked back to it, as did Jesus,	12:31
	as a time of faith.	12:35
	So our Lord Jesus went out into the wilderness	12:38
	shortly after his baptism and the descent of the dove.	12:40
	And in the wilderness, again, like Israel,	12:44
	he is tempted.	12:46
	And in the wilderness, again, he must decide	12:48
	if he will be	12:53
	a son of Canaan,	12:55
	or a son of Egypt.	12:58
	Though now, the name of Egypt may be wrong.	13:00
	We go through times of hardship:	13:06
	physical, psychological, spiritual.	13:09
	Times of illness, loss, and death.	13:12
	But I think none of those test Christians,	13:16
	not these days,	13:20
	in the way that our prosperity tempts us	13:22
	to selfishness,	13:27
	to self-centered life.	13:29
	The life truly of isolation.	13:32
	We live in fear with our possessions.	13:37
	We have gated communities.	13:41
	We have insurance.	13:45
	We take every means possible to protect our wealth	13:49
	for our children.	13:53
	And yet ultimately,	13:57
	it all is dust, even as we are.	14:00
	But old Jacob, somehow,	14:06
	kept his eye fastened	14:09
	on the eternal promise of God.	14:12
	When we are in Egypt, sometimes we want	14:18
	to wear the garb of Egypt.	14:20
	We want to make monuments to ourselves,	14:23
	like the Pharaohs did,	14:25
	and engrave our names on the monuments,	14:27
	even parts of it we didn't build,	14:30
	because we want to be remembered.	14:35
	We want to leave a name.	14:37
	We forget	14:42
	that we are not here to be blessed,	14:44
	but to bless.	14:48
	The old Bedouin blessed the Pharaoh.	14:51
	But our problem sometimes is,	14:57
	even as people of Christ, people of faith,	15:01
	that we so envy the world	15:06
	that we cannot bless it.	15:12
	Do you realize that you can't bless	15:15
	someone you envy?	15:21
	The second scene is gathered about the deathbed.	15:28
	There, Jacob speaks matter-of-factly,	15:33
	as well as poetically, with his sons and grandsons.	15:35
	He tells them where they're to go.	15:39
	He gives them a blessing, again, before he dies.	15:41
	And something about this scene	15:47
	is particularly appealing to me.	15:48
	You know, sometimes when you first read	15:51
	through a passage of Scripture,	15:52
	you find all the little nitty-gritty details	15:55
	of Joseph and his son arguing	15:58
	about which boy should be blessed.	16:01
	I didn't read you that part; that's not inspirational.	16:02
	They're haggling even on the deathbed.	16:07
	They're making decisions of the future.	16:10
	And yet,	16:16
	it also teaches us something we need to know.	16:18
	There are many outside these doors	16:22
	who consider themselves men and women of the world.	16:24
	Wise and shrewd, Jesus even told us	16:28
	that the children of this	16:32
	Kingdom of Light sometimes are not	16:34
	as shrewd as the others outside,	16:36
	and so we are to be as wise as serpents,	16:39
	but as gentle as doves.	16:44
	Some of us are as gentle as serpents and as wise as doves.	16:46
	That doesn't work.	16:50
	We must, as children of faith, also be children of fact.	16:55
	We must, as well as	17:02
	gazing upon the things of faith,	17:06
	we must also be realistic	17:11
	about the world around us.	17:15
	It is no good	17:21
	to live in some never-never world of an imagined faith	17:23
	where we live in a kind of bubble like the child	17:29
	whose immune system is so weak	17:34
	it cannot encounter the world.	17:36
	Christians cannot live like that.	17:38
	And over and over again, we find this	17:42
	fro and to going with Christianity from	17:45
	wild engagement with the world to	17:50
	ridiculous abstraction away from the world.	17:54
	Jacob and Joseph	18:00
	were realists,	18:02
	as well as people of faith.	18:04
	We must trust in the promise,	18:08
	but also, we must face reality.	18:10
	Pain is real.	18:14
	Death is God's enemy.	18:16
	The life of faith is the life of self-giving.	18:21
	Of inclusion,	18:27
	not exclusion.	18:29
	Of constant seeking	18:32
	to know the face of God,	18:34
	and not ever thinking	18:37
	we have seen God,	18:40
	and there is nothing more to be done or said.	18:43
	This requires from us both	18:47
	an engagement and a disengagement from the world.	18:50
	We must disengage from that part of the world	18:54
	that keeps us from living the Christ life.	19:00
	But we must engage with the world.	19:04
	We must be active in our businesses,	19:06
	in our careers, in our friendships,	19:10
	in our marriages, in our relations with our families.	19:12
	We cannot blink at truth.	19:19
	But we cannot go back	19:27
	into the past.	19:30
	There's a great deal of nostalgia these days.	19:32
	I guess there always has been.	19:36
	I think as you get older, you tend to	19:39
	think more about the past, and remember things.	19:42
	Sometimes, we want to live in the past.	19:45
	One of my favorite poets is Billy Collins.	19:49
	In the first place, I would love any poet	19:52
	who is named Billy.	19:54
	Billy Collins wrote, among other things,	19:57
	questions about angels.	20:00
	Or in his book, Questions About Angels,	20:02
	he wrote a poem entitled, "Nostalgia."	20:04
	Here's a bit of it.	20:09
	"Remember the 1340s?	20:11
	"We were doing a dance called the catapult.	20:14
	"You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,	20:18
	"And I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,	20:21
	"the ones with unicorns and pomegranates and needlework.	20:23
	"Everyone would pause for a beer	20:28
	"and onions in the afternoon,	20:31
	"and at night, we would play a game called Find the Cow.	20:33
	"Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.	20:38
	"I would love to return to 1901, if only for a moment.	20:43
	"The time enough to wind up a music box,	20:48
	"and do a few dance steps.	20:51
	"Or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941,	20:54
	"or at least let me recapture	20:57
	"the serenity of last month when we picked berries,	21:00
	"and glided through afternoons in a canoe.	21:04
	"Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.	21:08
	"I was in a garden then,	21:12
	"surrounded by the hum of bees	21:14
	"and the Latin names of flowers,	21:16
	"watching the early light flash	21:19
	"off the slanted windows of the greenhouse,	21:21
	"and silver the limbs on the rose of dark hemlocks.	21:24
	"As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,	21:29
	"letting my memory rush over them like water,	21:34
	"rushing over the stones on the bottom of the stream.	21:38
	"I was even thinking a little about the future.	21:42
	"That place where people are doing a dance	21:47
	"we cannot imagine.	21:51
	"A dance whose name we can only guess."	21:55
	John W. Gardner	22:05
	has written,	22:08
	"People of every age need commitments beyond the self.	22:10
	"Need the meaning that commitments provide.	22:17
	"Self-preoccupation is a prison,	22:21
	"as every self-preoccupied person finally knows.	22:23
	"Commitments to larger purposes	22:28
	"can get you out of prison."	22:31
	And that's what freed Jacob from his fears,	22:36
	from his family,	22:41
	to the future.	22:44
	Jacob said,	22:46
	"Do not take me to the Mesopotamia of my fathers,	22:47
	"do not even bury me in the splendid Egypt of my son,	22:52
	"but take me to the future of the promise to Canaan.	22:59
	"That is my home."	23:05
	The prisons that you and I face are not the same as Egypt,	23:10
	nor the prisons of Israel in Germany.	23:15
	But our prisons, sometimes,	23:18
	are as painful.	23:23
	They cause a lingering death.	23:27
	The insecurities of self-centeredness.	23:32
	The treadmill of earn, acquire, amass, and then worry.	23:37
	The boredom of the daily routine.	23:43
	Gardner again said,	23:47
	"Logan Pearsall Smith said once	23:49
	"that boredom can rise to the level	23:53
	"of a mystical experience.	23:57
	"If that is true, I know some very busy mid-level executives	24:00
	"who are among the great mystics of all time."	24:06
	But Jacob, and then Israel,	24:12
	and truly those in Christ,	24:15
	find a future	24:19
	that deliver from these prison houses,	24:21
	and deliver to the promises of God.	24:24
	So, the old wanderer had just one more trip to make.	24:29
	He had trusted his life in a promise	24:38
	he would never see.	24:42
	And for some of us,	24:46
	it may be true also,	24:48
	that we must pass it on to children and grandchildren,	24:50
	and children of their children yet unseen,	24:53
	to be the blessing God intends.	24:58
	So the old wanderer died,	25:05
	and was taken into the promise.	25:08
	And so did the young wanderer,	25:11
	whose name was Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ.	25:15
	A broken body.	25:23
	A lonely life.	25:25
	A wanderer's home.	25:28
	A poor man's possessions.	25:31
	A rebel's death.	25:34
	And a borrowed tomb.	25:38
	And like the modest family of Jacob in Egypt,	25:40
	this crucified Christ,	25:45
	with his family of the poor, of lepers,	25:50
	of powerless peasants and disenfranchised women,	25:56
	become the family of God,	26:03
	to which our Lord invites all	26:07
	to find meaning,	26:12
	and risk,	26:15
	and the future of God.	26:18
	May God make it so for all of us.	26:22
	Amen.	26:25

Item Info

Title:

Clyde Fant - "When Faith Lives in Egypt" (September 24, 2000)

Description:

Sermon start time: 04:12. Sermon end time: 26:26.
The story of Jacob's life is a reminder to us that we must keep our eye on the greater promises of God so as not to be distracted by the seductive wealth of the world. In doing this, we are actually better able to serve the world. (Abstract created by Duke Divinity School staff.)
Key quotation: “‘People of every age need commitments beyond the self, need the meaning that commitments provide. Self-preoccupation is a prison…Commitments to larger purposes can get you out of prison.’ And that’s what freed Jacob from his fears, from his family, to the future. Jacob said, ‘Do not take me to the Mesopotamia of my fathers. Do not even bury me in the splendid Egypt of my son. But take me to the future of the promise to Canaan. That is my home.’”

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https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4p55dx3d

Date:

September 24, 2000

Speaker:

Fant, Clyde E.

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Duke University. Chapel

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UA.17.01.0003 CS-1032
ref10221_ev6
uachapelsermaud
duke:320943
dcrau001676
ark:/87924/r4p55dx3d
f85a0b0d-83e4-4f25-87a9-7b99ab495cba

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