Then Joseph directed the physicians in his service to embalm his father Israel. So the physicians embalmed him … Genesis 50:2

Today’s Scripture Reading (May 19, 2012): Genesis 50

I have decided that it isn’t just Hindu’s that worship cows. The church is filled with Sacred Cows that we just can’t seem to sacrifice. A friend of mine was the pastor of a small rural church, and he told me the story of a photocopier that sat at the front of the sanctuary. It was a strange place to keep a photocopier, but beyond that, the photocopier didn’t even work. So one day he had a great idea. There was a storage room on the other side of the wall that the photocopier leaned up against. And so he moved the photocopier around the corner. The response of the congregation would have been a little softer if he had just told them that he no longer believed in The Ten Commandments. He had discovered one of the Sacred Cows of the congregation.

A Sacred Cow is something that we believe in that is unreasonably beyond question. And we have a lot of them. The difficulty with them is that often the Sacred Cow fulfilled a purpose at some time in the past. For my friend, there was a time when the church didn’t have a photocopier. A lady had passed away and left some money to the church and the church responded by using the money to satisfy the need. They bought the photocopier and it had a purpose, but now that purpose had expired. The photocopier had moved from being a piece of equipment that was needed by the church to a Sacred Cow that was never questioned in the life of the church. It was a ritual that meant something to a few (it reminded them of the one that had died), but nothing to most of the people in the church.

There are three healthy reasons for our involvement in something. The first reason is that we need to be involved in things that are a spiritually necessary. These are the things that God has commanded us to do and to accomplish. The Ten Commandments would fall into this category. But what Joseph did for his dad doesn’t fall into this category, but it does fall into the next two.

The second category is events that are culturally demanded, provided that the action doesn’t violate the first category. There are things that we need to be involved in because the culture demands it and God is neutral on the issue. There was no God demanded burial customs, but in Egypt – there were customs that the culture followed. The custom was that a person (especially one of wealth and importance) would be embalmed in such a way that the facial features were not changed. And this took time. Joseph, even though this was not the custom of his family, calls the Egyptian doctors and starts the process. But the embalming process was also expedient (the third reason why we do things.) My friends photocopier at one point had a purpose. For Joseph, Dad’s body was going to have to survive the journey home, so the Egyptian embalming process was necessary for that to happen.

Success has always been, and will always be, a function of understand these three reasons for doing something. And understanding which policies, procedures and events are not supported by one of these three reasons is probably one of the hardest things we will ever have to learn to do. If it was easy, we would have gotten rid of our Sacred Cows a long time ago.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Exodus 1