RoboPreacher

tell me you love me anyway The conclusion of the Joseph family saga : Today’s passage is the very end of the lovely Joseph saga . I commend it to you, Genesis 37 through 50. I’d like to read the entire story, but we’d run out of time.   So this passage might land the punch it packs, though, I’d like to give you a general idea of this story’s overall shape. To do that, I’d like to lead you through a little exercise. This is borrowed straight from the author, Kurt Vonnegut. You can YouTube his “shape of story” lecture .   He does this thing where he charts stories on a simple graph. The horizontal axis has a “B” on the left end and an “E” on the right , for Beginning and End. The vertical axis has a “G” at the top and an “I” at the bottom , for Good fortune and Ill fortune.   Now, Vonnegut works through this exercise to illustrate how most stories have the same trajectory, and nearly always lie . They presume to know more about life than we actually do.   If yo...

you fool it's only moonlight The best work a preacher can do is to simply get out of the way for Scripture, make room for the Bible to speak for itself.  Our first lesson today is the conclusion to the Joseph story. It is also the conclusion to the book of Genesis. In these six short verses we get to hear some of the most profound, most faithful words humans ever speak.  Not only that, but the seven beautiful words that tumble from the lips of Joseph, in the middle of these six verses, are so subtle, so concise and condensed they’re all too easy to miss; “Am I in the place of God.” To help us really hear these words, to let the profundity of these words take our breath away, in an attempt to get out of the way for Scripture, the sermon today will simply be telling the Joseph story. I will set everything up, but Scripture will have the last Word. For today we will let Joseph be our preacher. Before we start, think of Joseph as someone who knew for himsel...