CLW - Feb. 7, 2017 - Joel Gregory "Six Degrees of Separation"

9:01 and to the platform party, Dr. Crutchley, thank you for that very generous introduction. I'm always amused when people say I've been preaching 50 years. I want you to know I started when I was two. What a delight it is to be here. Time would fail me to thank God for what both the alumni and the students at Carson Newman have meant in my own life. Just trust that this institution has blessed me in ways going back and in anticipation going forward. Now this week we're going to be looking at divine pre-arrangements. We're going to seek to see that this universe is not some kind of cybernetic cosmic machine spewing out impersonal fate and you're caught in it. But there is a wise divine pre-arrangement in our lives. Today, six degrees of separation. Now that may or may not ring a bell to you, but about 20 years ago, a little more, it was the title of a movie. It starred Will Smith, Stockard Channing. Before that, it was a Broadway play, and before that, it was a real scientific experiment. Stanley Milgram, a sociologist, wanted to find out if a hunch he had was right, and that is that none of us is that many people away from any other of us.

10:29 So he designed an experiment. He gave back then when he did it postcards. Those were little things that you put in the mail. And he gave them randomly to 30 people in Omaha, Nebraska and asked them if they would send them to 30 people chosen randomly in Boston, Massachusetts. Not one person, as you might guess in Omaha, knew one of the people in Boston. So he said, send it to somebody who might know somebody who might know somebody. And they found out that only average, a randomly chosen person in Omaha, was only six people away from knowing a randomly chosen person in Boston. They knew somebody who knew somebody. You get it. Now, enter Facebook, with more than a billion people, it's estimated that nobody on Facebook is more than four people away from knowing somebody else. You know, I think about that sometimes.

11:34 I never knew the former president, President Obama, but I knew two people who ran out of his office often. So I was only one degree away from him and he knows the Queen. So I'm only two steps away from the Queen Hi Queen Yet when you look at a great biblical life like that of Joseph You see that he was Six steps away From where God wanted to get him In spite of anything and in the 37 chapter of Genesis is the beginning of his life. Most of us know this from somewhere, either from Sunday school or from Lloyd Webber's famous musical. Jacob dwelt in the land where his father was a stranger in the land of Canaan. In Genesis 37, it says, Joseph was 17 years old. He's feeding the flock with his brothers. And the lad was with the sons of Bilhah, the son of Zilpah, father's wife and Joseph brought a bad reporter to him to his father.

12:43 Translate that he was a snitch. Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children because he was a son of his old age and he made him a tunic of many colors. When his brothers saw their father loved him more than all his brothers they hated him and could not speak peaceably to him. Now Joseph had a dream and he told it to his brothers and they hated him even more so he said to them hear this dream I've dreamed there we were binding sheaves in the field then behold my sheaf arose and also stood upright and your sheaf stood all around it and bowed down to my sheaf and his brothers said shall you indeed reign over us or shall you indeed have dominion over so they hated even more for his dreams and for his words.

13:36 And that begins the long account of the life of the great-grandson of Abram, Abraham, Joseph. Now, in case you're not up on that narrative, let me give you about a minute and a half abridged, digested, cliff notes version. He's 17 years old. he was the favorite son of his father one of 12 siblings half siblings really he went out to check on his brothers keeping the flock I don't know what they were doing but he came back and snitched on them and it made his brothers so mad they were going to kill him then they said let's sell him to some slave traders and they sold him down the interstate to Egypt where Potiphar bought him Everything in Potiphar's house was blessed. Stocks up, bonds up, crops up, bank account up. Potiphar said, here, you've got everything except Mrs. Potiphar.

14:33 However, I think she was a member of the original cast of Desperate Housewives. She chased him around the house, grabbed his tunic, Exhibit A, lie with me, no, I won't sin against God. And he's in jail because he did the right thing. And yet, when he gets in jail, there's two VIP prisoners who are thrown in there with him. Pharaoh's butler, Pharaoh's baker. They have a dream. Joseph interprets their dream, and he's right. Mr. Butler, in three days you're going to be back? Well, Pharaoh, Mr. Baker, your head's going off. As the butler was leaving, Joseph gave him his business card. Only had two lines on it, Joseph dream interpreter. He said, remember me and tell Pharaoh I'm not supposed to be here. I did the right thing.

15:25 Butler gets amnesia. Then two years later, Pharaoh has a dream. You remember it from Sunday school, maybe. Seven fat cows, seven skinny cows, seven years of famine. Butler says, wait a minute. I've got a card. Somebody in your jail can interpret that. And suddenly, Joseph is out of jail and standing in front of the most powerful ruler in the world. And suddenly, he's the COO of Egypt. One degree at a time. Now, you don't know me, but I do know a Lord who knows the butler and the baker and the candlestick maker and a whole lot of others. And he is able to get you one step at a time to where he intends you to be.

16:26 And do you know he can do that in spite of how you got into the mess you're in? Some of us have a PhD in messology. And that's Joseph's situation. When you look at his life, Joe must have wondered, how did I get into some of these messes? Did I do it or was it done to me? You know, that's one of the things that gives the paralysis of analysis in life. Always looking in the rearview mirror saying, how did I get here? Was it my parents, my teachers? Did I do it? Well, the truth is some stuff was done to Joseph. He was the son of Jacob. Jacob's name means literally the tricky one. He was a scam artist, always one step ahead of the posse. Joseph didn't get a vote. in that. And then there was the strange family situation. Remember Jacob's story? You know, wanted to marry Rachel, worked seven years to get her on the honeymoon, looked under the veil, it's Leah, seven more years. That might not have been the best start, but then both of them gave him their handmaids as a concubine. So by the time we come to this story, there's 12 kids with four mothers living in one tent.

17:43 Now, you don't have to be James Dobson to figure that out. He grew up in that. And then added to that, his father favored him. Some people don't learn anything from their own autobiography, do they? Jacob's mother, Rebecca, had favored him, torn up the whole family over it. I guess Jacob didn't know the first law of holes, H-O-L-E-S. When you're in one, stop digging. And he did it again some stuff was done to

18:15 Joseph isn't that how life is but then he did some stuff to himself First of all he was a snitch If you're taking notes this morning, here's a big point most folks don't like snitches He snitched on them. I was preaching at Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, California California. Been there every May for many years. Pastor Jalford Smith Sr., renowned California Christian leader. He had so much authority in that city he could ask a judge to give him a young man and he got a young man out of jail so he could come to the church. It had an equivalency program, a GED program. He was in there studying. When he got a text message, said it was from his girlfriend, come outside wanted to see him. He got this young man out of prison, injured young man. The teacher said, don't go out. He went out. That church is on International Boulevard, most dangerous street in the third most dangerous city. And right under a blue wall with a gold cross, this young man was shot dead by his old gang. They thought the only way he could have gotten out of prison was that he was a snitch. Well, that's how Joseph's brothers felt about it.

19:39 I want to kill you. He got in trouble. Some he made himself, but also he told people his dreams who were not ready for his dreams. God will give you some visions, dreams, things that are so intimate and personal that you want to tell them, but sometimes people aren't ready to hear them. Jesus said don't don't cast your pearls before Swine don't give what's holy to the dogs he meant by that Don't tell everybody your dreams. They're not already for them So here's Joseph. He did some things to himself some things were done to him You're about the millennial bridge In London it goes from the Tate Museum on the south bank of the Thames to the st. Paul's Cathedral on the Norah. They opened it January 1st, 2000. Supposed to be a marvel of engineering, but when people got on it, it began to wobble. It didn't wobble a little. It wobbled so much they thought it was going to fall into the Thames. They were grabbing the struts, holding the wires. They got everybody off, and the next day they let them on 25 at a time, and it did the same thing.

20:52 What are they gonna do they shut it down and engineers worked on it for a year, but Basically, they couldn't decide whether the bridge made the people wobble Or the people made the bridge wobble They just knew it was wobbly I'm close to me just a minute There may be one somebody here today And you say wobble Yes, I feel that way Wobble I'm not exactly sure how I got where I am. I don't know whether the situation made me wobble or I made the situation wobble, but I do know it's wobble.

21:35 Grace means you don't have to figure all of that out for God to get you one degree closer to where he wants to get you. We can live our lives Can we? Looking in the rear view mirror trying to figure everything out When God says I can use all of it To get you one degree closer to where I want to get you And you know he can even when you do right and it turns out wrong He can use that here's Joseph sold down into slavery in Egypt Mr. Potiphar bought him Potiphar the word seems to be slaughter that shouldn't have been real encouraging but there he was working in Potiphar's house God's hand was on Joseph I don't know how everything was up Potiphar said look here's the keys to the Bentley here's my American Express card here's the key to the wall safe I'm out of here. It's all yours except Mrs. Potiphar. And there in that moment when she was chasing this 17-year-old around the house, running in and out of the door, he finally says, I'll not sin against God. He did what was right, and it turned out wrong. One of the hardest things in life is to do the right things and somehow things start to go wrong.

23:18 That happened to Joseph and he wound up in jail. There may be one somebody here today. You know, I made a decision to be a person of faith. I confessed that. I was baptized. I thought, and a Christian, and I, and things just don't seem to be turning out. right and there's whole books in the Bible about that one of them called Job doing right and it seems to turn out wrong anybody here remember mr. Bozo I remember mr. Bozo you can still get mr. Bozo mr. Bozo you can get him at Toys R Us he's four feet six inches tall you blow him up and you hit him anybody remember Mr. Bozo? I remember I got him third grade. I thought if I could hit him hard enough, he'd just stay down. In fact, my whole gang got together. We all hit him. Hate to tell you this, we took a baseball bat to him. Our view was if you just hit him hard enough, he will stay down.

24:32 After a year of that, we got curious and did some forensic surgery on Mr. Bozo, which was a very deflating experience for him. And we found out he had something in him we didn't know about. And that was true of Joseph, a person of God, a ballast, a weight, a substance in his life that nobody knew about. consequently when he went to the jail god's hand was on him there he is here's the jail he's been up down up down and he's in jail and two vip prisoners come to jail just at that time now butler and the baker might make you think that the butler just forgot to pick up pharaoh's dry cleaning the baker burned the rolls but scholars tell us these would have been counselors vice regents, cabinet members, they whispered in Pharaoh's ear. They gave him advice. Somehow they gave him bad advice and he threw them in the clink. But Joseph is already a person of God's choice. Jail never been calmer. He's made a trustee. Jailer says, here's the keys. I'm going on a cruise to the Bahamas. This is a loose translation. But anyway, things were real good in the jail. And they have a dream. They have a dream. One of the founders of psychiatry, Carl Jung, was very interested in dreams. Sigmund Freud was the atheistic founder of psychiatry. Jung was a theist of some kind, not quite sure. He came up with a term called synchronicity, a Multisyllabic word he invented it. It was the last book he wrote

26:33 And it was a book about the fact that things happen in our lives that have no causal connection, but they come together meaningfully He had a woman in his consultation room. She'd been locked down in her life due to certain kinds of guilt or hysteria. He couldn't get anywhere with her. She came in for a session and she said, Last night I dreamed about a scarab beetle, one of those ugly green big beetles.

27:04 She was facing a window. Jung's back was to that window and he kept hearing something thump on the window. He looked at it. And it was a scarab beetle. He opened the window, grabbed it, showed it to her. And in his book, Synchronicity, he said from that moment forward, she began to be released from what was holding her down. That's a moment of synchronicity. It was like that when the butler and the baker showed up and had a dream.

27:39 God can use anything. There he is in the synapses of people's minds, neurons firing off, and there's God getting Joseph one degree closer to the next thing he had for him. He interprets the dream because those two prisoners got together in synchronicity with what God was doing in his life.

28:02 Here's where I wish I could sit across the table from you, have a cup of tea or coffee, and tell you some stories about my own life. About 20 years ago, I was both preaching and publishing in a difficult passage in my own life. About every other month, I'd go up to New York City. That's where a lot of publishing stuff happens. One night, a plane was hours late getting into Newark Liberty Airport, way after midnight. I was tired. I was hungry. It was February. It was icy. I did something I've never done before after. I grabbed my bag off the carousel, went out to the cab line, told the first cab driver, take me to the closest hotel. I don't care where it is. Well, it was about the end of the runway. He stopped and said, here it is. It's an old, worn out Ramada Inn. I went in and looked over here.

28:56 There's a grill, probably two in the morning. Somebody's eating. I sat down and said, give me what he had, chicken and rice soup. Out of the back of there, a voice. Dr. Gregory. Now my first impulse was to raise my hand. It was Newark after all. A tall, handsome, 20-something, young African-American man walked up to me and said, I'm so surprised to see you here. And I said, I'm surprised too. He said, I'm Joe Carter, pastor of the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, 106 Sussex in Newark. I just finished reading your autobiography today.

29:49 I looked at him, he looked at me, we looked at one another, and it dawned on us it wasn't an accident that we were there. In fact, the subsequent years have demonstrated it wasn't an accident. Indeed. Over and over, his life and mine have been crossed that way by Providence. I'm preaching in Chicago. I call my friend in Newark to see how he is. He says, are you in Chicago? I'm in Waukegan at my mother's. Preaching in Los Angeles. Call my friend, say, I'm out in L.A., Joe. How you doing? He said, I'm in L.A. too. My sister's sick.

30:29 Where are you staying? I'm staying at the Bonaventure. I'm at the Bonaventure too. Now, you may say things like that are just accidents. You know, the odds catch up with you. If you have that mentality, you think a printing plant would blow up and dictionaries would fall out of the air.

30:50 We've worked together for racial reconciliation, for training preachers, dozens of ways. He's on my ministry board. Oh, because that 2 a.m. in the grill in a worn-out Ramada Inn, God made an appointment. it. Young said, the more you look for that, the more you see it. And that's true. God moments, somebody across the hall from you in a dormitory apartment, somebody next to you in a class, somebody across the aisle from you on an airplane or right next to you, somebody behind the counter in a convenience store. God hangs the heaviest weights on some meetings that to you will look accidental. Well, there's Joe in jail, interprets the dream. Butler gets out, gets amnesia. Have you ever had anybody forget you?

31:50 You'd help them and they forgot you. You opened your home, helped them when they were down, and then they forgot you when you were down and they were up, you opened your purse or your billfold. You even used your own influence to get them where they were. And when things got good for them and bad for you, they forgot you. You know God can even use that. He can. Because at just the right time when Pharaoh had his dream about seven fat cows, seven skinny cows, suddenly God took Joseph on the last degree. Pharaoh has his dream Butler says I've sinned against God you've got a dream interpreter in your jail Pharaoh tried everybody tried his astrologers, his soothsayers he'd read the read the astrology column in the daily paper, he'd even called up that lady on TV at the 800 number what was your sister Cleo, whoever that was nobody could tell him what it meant Amen.

32:56 there's a knock at the jailhouse door. Joseph, Pharaoh will see you. Put on a new tunic. They probably oiled himself as they did so he would shine. There he is in front of Pharaoh. Suddenly, and in just a moment, he interprets the dream. gonna be a big famine coming pharaoh pharaoh gets concerned he sends a text message to his hr department i need somebody to run a national food program they send him back a text he was in egyptian hieroglyphics it said duh he's standing in front of you and suddenly After every up and down Joseph moves the last degree.

34:00 You know, sometimes what God does is a steady evolution. Often it is one degree at a time. It happened that way to Joseph up to a point. But suddenly, God does that. Here are shepherds out in the field watching their sheep by night. It's a tough job. Not much going on every now and then. The mountain lion roars, but most time it's just, but suddenly there's an angel. And with the angel of multitude, the heavenly host, and everything changed.

34:36 Here's the early church discouraged there in the upper room, 120 of them trying to figure out what's going to happen next. He said when he went up to wait, they're waiting, nothing's happened. but suddenly there's the sound of a rushing mighty wind and flame. Church is born. I could testify to you if we had time. How after one degree at a time, suddenly. things can come together.

35:12 You know, we're not here because of Joseph. We're here because of someone who had his DNA humanly, Jesus. Strange comparisons going way back in the church. Both of them came into an unusual family situation. Joseph, well, four women, one tent, 12 and a half siblings. Jesus, well, what a strange family situation.

35:39 Old carpenter engaged to probably a teenage girl. Suddenly. Joseph had to go down to Egypt one degree at a time. Interesting, so did Jesus. Turn in the road, Herod trying to kill the babies and where does that little baby go? Retraces the steps of Joseph one degree at a time. Joseph's brothers didn't believe in him. Did they ever not believe in him? They sold him down the interstate. Neither did Jesus' brothers. John 7 says they mocked him. You think you're a prophet. You got dreams of being a prophet, go down to Jerusalem. That's where prophets go. They didn't believe in him, but suddenly, Six degrees of separation.

36:36 You can count them all. Brothers selling him down the interstate. Potiphar's wife, jail. Butler Baker dream. and suddenly God got him where he intended him to be. I wonder what degree you're all. Let's pray a minute.

37:10 Oh God of all of our days, God of prearrangements, we can't imagine. Grant to us the confidence. the trust. that you are indeed the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. and the world of now may we believe what you did then you do now and then the world of here help us to believe that you can do here what you did there give us the confidence to go the next degree