If you were here last
Sunday, you might recall that I mentioned that there are two different Old
Testament tracks available to us during these summer months. Here at Emmanuel
you’ve been on Track 2 while Track 1 has been rolling along with Genesis since Trinity
Sunday. Luther was gracious to let us jump over during my two weeks which means
I preached part one of a preaching series and today, on my last Sunday with
you, we will tackle part two.
If you were not able to be
here last Sunday, here is the executive summary of that sermon: Jacob and Sons
were a hot mess.
The sordid saga of Joseph
and his brothers began back in the 37th chapter of Genesis. There
we saw Joseph as a seventeen-year old spoiled brat whose most favorite thing in
the world was to report back to daddy whenever his shepherd brothers messed up!
So Joseph’s brothers are not very fond of him. In fact the Bible uses a word
that most of us who are parents forbid our kids to use. It says his brothers
“hated” him. In fact, that they hated him enough to want to kill him. This is
sibling rivalry on steroids. In the end, they settle for throwing him into a
pit and then selling him off as a slave to some foreign traders. This is bad
stuff.
And that is where we left
Joseph last weekend: sold to those Midianite traders for twenty pieces of
silver. (Genesis 37:28). The brothers return home and tell their father that a
wild animal has killed their brother. As evidence of Joseph’s death, in a world
before DNA testing, they present Jacob with that “amazing technicolor Dreamcoat”
smeared in animal blood. Jacob is a mess, as any parent who loses a child
naturally would be. Except that in this case, it is all an elaborate and
horrible lie. Joseph is not really dead.
What happened between last
week and this week, in the eight chapters that the lectionary skips over? The
narrator takes us to Egypt, where Joseph has been sold to a man named
Potiphar, a captain in Pharaoh’s guard. The two get along quite well. The
narrator tells us that Joseph was “handsome and good-looking.” (Genesis 39:6b)
To be honest I am not certain what the difference is between “handsome” and
“good looking”—it sounds a little redundant to me. But maybe that’s the point.
Joseph is very easy on the eyes.
Joseph ends up in an
Egyptian prison for a crime he did not commit. He’s set up by Potiphar’s wife.
But remember, Joseph is not only a dreamer but a dream interpreter. The way he
gets out of jail free is to interpret a very strange dream of Pharaoh’s about
seven fat cows and seven skinny cows and another one about and seven full ears
of corn and then seven skinny ears. No one seems to be able to understand what
it all means, except for Joseph. It comes easily to him, but to be honest, this
particular dream is more about sound economic policy than an advanced seminar in
Karl Jung. The dream means that there will be seven years of good crops
followed by seven years of an economic downturn. So if Egypt is smart
they will save up during the good years in order to be prepared for the lean
ones. Joseph is promoted to become Secretary of Agriculture under Pharaoh to
oversee that process and that is what they do.
In the meantime, Jacob and
sons move on with their lives as best they can. But they have now hit upon
tough times back in Canaan because it’s the seven lean years and no one
told them to save up during the seven fat years. So Jacob sends his sons
to Egypt looking to see if there is an economic stimulus package in
the works coming out of Cairo. And that brings us to where we are
today.
Joseph recognizes his
brothers immediately. But remember
that when they last saw him he was just a kid. Now he is a successful and
powerful political appointee in the Egyptian cabinet, and they simply do not
recognize the man before them as their brother. If he has harbored bitter
resentments toward them for all these years, now is his chance to get his pound
of flesh. Now is his opportunity to have them thrown into a dark pit and left
for dead and see how they like it. Revenge! So sweet!
But Joseph doesn’t do
that. Instead he weeps so loudly that Pharaoh’s whole household hears him. And
then he embraces his brothers.
Forgiveness. Can you
imagine?
The late Walter
Brueggemann said that this story is about the challenge to live our lives
“between the hint of the dream, and the doxology of disclosure.” That’s good
Old Testament theology but let’s break it down into plain English. We get these
hints and guesses of God’s dream for this world, and we hope for the Kingdom of
God to break in on earth as it is in heaven so we can one day sing praise God
from whom all blessings flow! We pray for that Kingdom to come every time we
gather for worship. Yet we live our lives between those two realities: between
the already and the not yet, between the hint of the dream and the doxology of
disclosure.
When someone suffers a
trauma, as Joseph did, it’s easy to understand how that person’s nightmares will
win out, and that person will be left embittered and blaming the world. Or
blaming themselves. It’s easy to get stuck in a loop and feel there is no
future. But if one is able to live “between the hint of the dream, and the
doxology of disclosure,” one is already seeing that the story doesn’t end in
that pit. The process of claiming new life, for Joseph, began long before that
day his brothers appeared before him. As Andy Dufrasne puts it in The
Shawshank Redemption, “you can get busy living or get busy dying.”
Joseph has gotten busy living.
And because of that, he has let go of the need to seek revenge on his brothers
or for that matter to let them live rent free in his head. Instead, he wants to
hug them. He wants to find out how his father is doing. He wants to get busy
living.
So this Joseph story is an
Easter story. It is about redemption and healing and new life and just as
importantly it is about trusting that God is with us in the pit or a prison
cell and in the depths of our deepest fears and pain, and even unto death on a
cross on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
We, too, live between the
hint of the dream and the doxology of disclosure. As St. Paul did, when he was
sitting in a prison cell nearly two thousand years ago, yet hardly able to
contain himself, writing to the Church in Philippi:
I thank God
every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my
prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first
day until now…I want you to know, beloved, that what has happened to me has
actually helped to spread the gospel.
(Philippians 1:3,4,12)
From prison, Paul writes
that! He faced that same choice that Joseph faced: to get busy living or to get
busy dying. He chose life. He chose to see God at work in his life even on the hardest of days and to find purpose and meaning in his imprisonment. He chose to live
between the hint of the dream and toward the doxology of disclosure.
You and I are invited to
follow these good examples. It’s hard, for sure. But praising God always leads
to love of neighbor. Even those who have so terribly hurt us. I think of Don
Henley’s words from “The Heart of the Matter.” I won’t sing them for you – it’s
too early in the day for that. But perhaps you know them and you can sing them on
your way home:
I’ve been
tryin’ to get down to the heart of the matter, but my will gets weak and my
thoughts seem to scatter. But I think it’s about forgiveness. Forgiveness.
And of course I think of
Eliza Hamilton, when it’s quiet uptown and she has been so hurt by Alexander’s
infidelity and by the death of their son, Philip. And yet, she also chooses to
live between the hint of the dream and the doxology of disclosure. As a
faithful Christian woman, an Episcopalian in fact, she knows how to unlock the
future. Forgiveness. Can you imagine?
By God’s grace, it happens
in our lives from time to time, in small and sometimes in large ways. And when
it does, it unleashes the power of God and it opens up grace upon grace and new
possibilities. We need these old Bible stories, I think, because in our very
real twenty-first century lives we, too, live “between the hint of the dream and
the doxology of disclosure.”
So here is the thing I
want to say to you today, friends: trusting
that hint of the dream is what makes the doxology of disclosure possible.
Acting on the hints and guesses that lead us to risk healing and reconciliation
opens up, again and again invitations for us to see the living God at work in
our lives. This is the work the Church is called to in this time and place: to
not lose heart, to be agents of healing and reconciliation in a polarized
world.
Before I leave you, Emmanuel, a book recommendation. A challenging one by one of my favorite theologians, Miroslav Volf, a Croatian born theologian who directs the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Last I heard, Volf was worshiping in the Episcopal Church in Guilford, Connecticut. In his book, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, Volf slows down the drama of an embrace as the key to reconciliation. The drama needs to be mirrored by the other. Simply put you cannot force someone to hug you. That’s not an embrace. You open, and you wait. They need to open, and wait, before an embrace can happen. We can practice this but it’s hard. Embrace is a dance, and reconciliation that leads to healing requires a partner.
What is happening in today’s Old Testament reading is a miracle and by God’s grace it happens for us every once in a while: old hurts are put aside and the future becomes possible. Forgiveness. Can you imagine?
May this Joseph story empower and equip us to be more hopeful and more courageous agents of healing and reconciliation, for the living of these days. Keep practicing doxology, so that from the hint of the dream we can open our own arms and lean into it, by God’s grace.
Praise God. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise God, all creatures here below. Praise God the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer. Amen.
