Sermon – Potholes and Speedbumps
Genesis 37:12-24; 1 John 4:1-16
Farmville Presbyterian Church
2/23/25
There is a funny thing about life: plans do not always work out. In fact, most of the time things do not turn out as we plan. You may have already found your plans for today to be thwarted. Maybe you were planning for that strawberry jam on your toast, and you found it all gone. Sure, it might be something small, but so many things do not go the way we plan or hope. This is why one of the most important things I share at wedding rehearsals is to be ready for things to happen that we do not expect. In fact, those accidents or surprises will make the experience more memorable – at least that is the way I want to look at those happenings. You might imagine that families getting ready for weddings can become very focused on everything going correctly. After all, a lot of time and money and effort and money and planning and money have gone into the event. I am finding some of this out myself, and I have observed true wedding stress already, and we still have 8 months to go.
At my own wedding, our little niece who was not even four years old at the time was a flower girl and had a fit right in the middle of the service. She wanted her daddy on the other end of the wedding party, and when mommy didn’t let her go over there, she began crying and yelling. Our friend, who we brought down to Hampden-Sydney from Richmond to read Scripture, was drowned out. Every once in a while, we do remind her of this. We have to laugh about it now, but at the time, it was not quite as funny. Someone else who was not laughing was Joseph.
It is really hard for me to see Joseph as a bright guy. He must have been intelligent for how well he managed things for important people later in life, but at this point in his story, he is thick as a brick. God had given him one dream in which his brothers were bowing down to him – his OLDER brothers mind you, TEN of them. They did not even share the same mom. They were half-brothers technically. They would obviously take that dream well. Of course, they did not. They despised Joseph. They despised him because he was clearly dad’s favorite son. That was the reason for his very fancy coat. Joseph was the youngest except for his baby brother, but he was treated special, as if he was the oldest of them all. You would think that was the extent of Jospeh’s bragging, but when he had a second dream in which they all bowed down to him, including the parents, he had to tell them that one, too. NO ONE took it well, including dad. The brothers were so upset with his pride and arrogance that when they had the chance, they decided to end Jospeh. You heard the first plan. It was to kill him. Thankfully, one of the brothers thought otherwise, even if it was really just to spare their father Jacob the heartache.
Whatever Jospeh might have expected for his life, it was not to be jumped by his brothers and thrown into a pit. It was not to be humiliated and sold as a slave. It was certainly not to end the day with his father and rest of the family thinking he was dead. Nowhere in Joseph’s plans for the day was there a pit and animal blood and a torn robe. Nowhere in his plans was there a one-way ticket to Egypt. He never saw his home again, ever. Of course, this was only the beginning. When he adapted to being the very successful steward of the Egyptian Potiphar’s house, he was framed for a crime and was sent to prison. When he had a chance to be redeemed by one of Pharoah’s servants, that servant forgot about Jospeh for years. When Joseph finally made it in front of Pharoah to interpret his dream, he was given a new story. There is no evidence Jospeh expected any of this. He served as Pharoah’s right-hand man for years and guided the nation through bumper crops and famine. Then, one day something else happened.
We all have options when our plans go sideways, and I am not just talking about when a hurricane rolls through the Caribbean in the summer before your wedding, and you see the hotel where you had booked your stay on television, and there are no more walls, just empty floors and ceilings. If that sounds weirdly specific, it is. That is what happened to our honeymoon. Thankfully, they were able to rebuild quickly enough where we were able to go down to St. Thomas over the following spring break. In the grand scheme of things, that is fairly silly. We were inconvenienced, but things worked out fine in the end. That has been the least of our challenges, to be honest. The bigger surprises, the dramatic left turns, the truly difficult changes to our plans and expectations are a whole lot tougher. Those are the life-changing moments, and they can be most difficult. I had potholes and speedbumps in mind as the things that can affect our journeys but that honestly does not do justice to what people must face.
We may dream of growing old with someone, and that does not happen. We may plan on a life with family, and that plan can be rewritten in so many unexpected ways. We may hope for a job that ends up being less than a vocation. When a child is on the way, we can so easily begin imagining what they might be like and what they might be able to do. No child is perfectly and entirely normal, just like none of us is perfectly and entirely normal. We may come into the world with unplanned struggles, but we will certainly find them along the road. Whether you agree with what the president has been doing in Washington or not, that has uprooted so, so many plans in America and beyond. Just making plans or having expectations out of that is going to be incredibly tough. It seems to fit the old adage that the only real constancy in life is change.
That change can truly hurt. It can deeply disappoint. It can crush people when it is something we earnestly care about or something vitally important to us. The Bible even cautions us against counting on what might happen even tomorrow, let along next year: James 4:13-15 reminds us, “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’ yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’” It seems strange to hear that we cannot even expect tomorrow to work out reasonable well just on its own. On the one hand, it makes sense that all of time is God’s, but on the other hand, we make plans all the time for tomorrow and beyond without so much as a thought of God’s willingness. When was the last time you made a doctor’s visit and told the scheduling nurse, “God willing, I’ll be there?” I do not believe I have ever thought that once.
Things happen that truly surprise us. Our expectations and plans can change so, so easily. Sometimes those changes are good. When Jospeh was serving as Pharoah’s second hand man, his brothers showed up one day to purchase grain for their family. There was a famine and they were in danger of starving. He did not expect to see them, and it was overwhelming to have them before him and at his mercy. He had a choice there. He could have dealt with them as they did with him. That would have been exceedingly easy, but he chose to continue to hold them in his heart. They got the grain and even their money back. He wanted to know how they were and to see his little brother. When they finally had a reunion, it was his greatest moment. It was the happiest day of his life. His answer to them was love.
Love is literally the only thing that will get us through life together. This is the glue that keeps in God’s heart and us in each other’s. This is why God has a hand in our days and happenings. God does will good for us because God is love. Even when that good does not seem very good at the time, God’s love and our shared love will see us through. When we do honestly love, we are honestly sharing God.
It is remarkable to be how people can experience a time of real change and disappointment or loss and come out as more loving. I was speaking to someone who just went through a very scary time of cancer treatment for a kind of cancer that does not give the person good odds. That person was actually grateful for the experience in the way that now that person could relate to others who had gone through something similar. It might not make sense to everyone, maybe to hardly anyone. God loves us through those times of struggle and makes us better able to love on the other side, if we are willing to see it. God’s goal for us all is to become the most loving people that we can possibly be. That’s it. Love requires us to be authentic before God and each other. It requires us to be our best selves and to reflect God’s heart. Love will be able to handle anything life throws at us because God and love is willing to walk with us through anything. There is nowhere we can go or nothing that we can do or nothing that can happen that will move us from our place in true love. The only thing that limits us is our willingness to share. To God be the glory. Amen.