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Favre retired in March, after 16 wonderful seasons with the Packers. It was punctuated, his retirement, with a very teary press conference. Except, that Favre didn’t want to stay retired. And that’s okay, except the Green Bay Packers didn’t want him back. They had “moved on,” as they said. Negotiations began. Would Favre play or not play? For whom would he play if he did? In fact, at one point, the Green Bay Packers offered Brette Favre $20 million NOT to play, to stay retired. I almost wrote to the Packers [laughter] to ask them if they would pay ME $20 million not to play. How would this end? There was a midnight flight from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to Wisconsin. Every website was filled with intrigue. Brette Favre was reinstated by the NFL, and he was all set to play, to come back for the Packers. And suddenly --- suddenly and unexpectedly --- he was traded to the New York Jets, where he will now play the Buffalo Bills twice a year. None of this should matter this morning. It shouldn’t matter at all as much as it did, this trivial pursuit, except for the way in which it was portrayed. There was lots of talk about the Packers “family,” and anger, and betrayal, and mistrust, and lies, and deception within the Green Bay Packer family. Consider the Olympics. I must confess, I’m still a huge Olympics fan. I love what the Olympics seemingly used to stand for and still hope it might stand for some day. That’s why I watch everything zealously. I watch the big things: Michael Phelps setting world records; the Dream Team, now called the “Redeem Team;” those extraordinary Chinese gymnasts. But I love to watch the little things as well: fencing, and team handball, and badminton. I love it all. None of that should particularly matter this morning. Perhaps, though, it should matter a little bit more than it does. We used to speak of the Olympics as a gathering of the “family of nations” for a friendly, and spirited, and amateur competition. You remember Chariots of Fire, and all that? Now there’s so much money involved and so much skepticism because of the threat of performance enhancing drugs that we don’t quite know what to do with it all. And plus, this year, more than any other year, there’s the politicization of the Olympics. You know that something serious is happening when coverage includes not only lots of news about the “very old” 41-year-old Dara Torres, but Darfur and Tibet, and religious repression and religious freedom. Or consider the Anglican Communion, the Episcopal Church, as we know it. They’ve just finished the Lambeth Conference --- which happens every ten years. All the bishops from the Anglican Communion around the world gather in Canterbury. This year’s conference made news more for who was not invited than for who was. The issue, of course, is who will get ordained in the Anglican Communion. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams (who has been quoted from this pulpit from time to time as a wonderful scholar known for being open and inclusive), decided not to invite the controversial American bishop Gene Robinson, as a way to mollify the more conservative bishops. But even so, 250 of those bishops boycotted the conference, which undermined the “un-invitation” to Gene Robinson. Of course I don’t mean to meddle. Their church business is their church business. But why it would be considered this morning is because a rift in the Anglican and Episcopal “family” is a rift in the Christian “family,” of which we are all a part. And even so, therefore, consider the American Presbyterian church. Our issues are similar, though they don’t grab so much attention, because we don’t have things like archbishops. At the San Jose General Assembly in June, the commissioners made decisions to advance the cause of justice and inclusivity. Those decisions were met with great joy by some, great nervousness by others, and great anger by even others in our family. In fact, some Presbyterian sisters and brothers are meeting this week to determine their future within the Presbyterian church, talking about things like property and money. And there is, again, great conflict in the Presbyterian family. Or consider your own family, or any family you’ve ever known, not just the ones we see in stereotype on television. Your current family, or your family of origin, or the family to which you’ve been partnered. Remember family members no longer with you. And remember the ones who are still with you, that you’re not so sure about. And remember the gift of family, but also the deep challenges and complexities and heartaches. Or consider the family of Joseph, whose story we dip into this morning at its beginning, and which you can follow throughout the book of Genesis. One way to read the Old Testament is to read it as a family story, the founding and forming of the family of God. At the center of that family story is the story of Jacob, and the Joseph narratives are part of Jacob’s story. We’ve heard all the reasons why Jacob favors Joseph. You remember the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and all that. And perhaps for Jacob, a parenting class would have been in order. But nonetheless, sibling rivalry abounds. It’s rather textbook, is it not? The brothers set off the plot. And Joseph’s death seems imminent, which takes us beyond a mere sibling rivalry to a family conflict with very, very dire circumstances. Then for today the story stops. We know how it ends only when we continue with the narrative, where we discover forgiveness and reconciliation, where we discover the loving will of a forgiving God, where we encounter transformed human behavior that redeems both the agent of conflict and its recipient. What does that mean for every family grouping of which we are a part? What does it mean for your birth family, whether you are a child or enjoying (like Dara Torres) middle age, or are advanced in years with much water over the dam and much life experience to consider? What does it mean for your neighborhood family? For those with whom in geographical proximity you live? What does it mean for your civic family? This city or the communities that surround it? What does it mean for your work family? The people perhaps with whom you spend more time than you do with the people you live with at home? What does it mean for your church family --- this church family here at Third Church? For our presbytery family or our denominational family of which we are a part? What it means is that God yearns for unity and reconciliation. God yearns for us to face up to the issues and the behaviors that divide us and calls us to transcend them. I don’t know how the Packers saga will work out. But here’s a little prediction. Brett Favre will play one year with the Jets and will retire again. And then the Packers will sign him for one more year, a kind of farewell tour. They’ll pay him a lot of money, and then they’ll keep paying him a lot of money. I don’t know how the Olympics will work out. But hopefully they can transcend the hype and the cynicism and provide something inspirational athletic and political and cultural and human. I really don’t know how any of these denominational situations will work themselves out. But I do believe our special vocation is to pray hard and to work hard for justice and for unity. But I do know how the Joseph story worked out. At the end of it all, the brothers asked Joseph, “Will you forgive us?” “Of course,” he said, “Of course I will.” And there was family unity, and family reconciliation, and a witness now thousands of years later to us about how God wants things to be, and how God helps things to turn out. Perhaps it’s working out already. If you watched that spectacular opening ceremony, amid the technical and the artistic wonder, there was a highlight for me. It happened when the Chinese delegation marched in to the national stadium. And there you saw basketball star and flag bearer Yao Ming, who plays most of the time for the Houston Rockets. And next to him was nine-year-old Lin Hoa, a pupil from the earthquake-hit area of the Southeast China Sichuan province. They came in together. Did you see it? It was extraordinary. First of all, Yao Ming is 7 feet 4 inches, and Lin Hoa is not 7 feet 4 inches. And the story goes that when the May 12th earthquake struck, that Lin Hoa risked his life and suffered multiple injuries by rescuing his schoolmates from the collapsed buildings. So many still died. And he was asked later why he did it. “Well, I was the hall monitor,” he said, “It was my job.” And for a modest moment, for a modest moment, our divisions, our political and cultural and religious and economic and family differences were transcended in the face of human need. And not to add hype to the already over hyped Olympic experience, but for that modest moment, we were family. Which seems to me to be God’s agenda: to pull us out, to pull us out of earthquakes, to pull us out of pits in the desert, to pull us out of brokenness of every kind, to forgive, to redeem each of us, and to redeem the families, all of the families into which God places us, that we too may offer forgiveness to one another, and by God’s grace, to receive it. May it be so. Amen.
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