The Meaning In Troubles

"The Meaning In Troubles"

Genesis 45:1-5
August 17, 2008

Then Joseph could no longer control himself before all those who stood by him, and he
cried out, “Send everyone away from me.” So no one stayed with him when Joseph
made himself known to his brothers. And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it,
and the household of Pharaoh heard it. Joseph said to his brothers, “I am Joseph. Is
my father still alive?” But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at
his presence. Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Come closer to me.” And they came
closer. He said, “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not
be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me
before you to preserve life.

Most of us grew up with the epic story of Joseph and his coat of many colors, a story of
the deception and cruelty of his brothers, who threw him down that well, wanting to kill
him, but who eventually decide to sell him off as a slave. It was the dreams that caused
the rage in Joseph’s brothers, those dreams that seemed to tell of the future, of what
was to come, not only in his life, but in the life of others.   But maybe it wasn’t only the
dreams that infuriated them—it was probably the clear favoritism that their father Jacob
had for his youngest son Joseph that also caused resentment in the other boys—he
was the son that came late into his father’s life, a late and unexpected gift, the twelfth
son, the golden child. Maybe you’ve been that golden child, or you’ve been on the
sidelines as one of your siblings has been the Joseph in your family.

Nonetheless, Joseph was that child in his family and so it set into motion a great drama
in which he fends off the advances of his master’s wife in Egypt, which ironically lands
him in a jail with two other men who have also offended their employer—in cases of the
cup bearer, and the baker, the employer is the Pharaoh. Dreams are then discussed,
and interpreted, and eventually Joseph’s interpretation puts him squarely in front of the
Pharaoh who gets his own dreams parsed out, interpreted and explained, and out of
that moment, Joseph is put in charge of putting away enough food to get Egypt through
a time when the crops will fail all throughout the region. Of course, we know what
happens—years later, Joseph’s brothers travel to Egypt to buy some of that stored
food when their own crops fail, but they don’t recognize the man in front of him, they
don’t recognize Joseph as their brother. Joseph puts them through the rigors, setting
them up, making them jump through hoops, testing them, seeing who they have
become, and seeing what has become of their father.

It now has come down to a set-up in which Joseph has framed his brother Benjamin for
theft, and who is now being held in a Egyptian prison. The brothers are standing
before him, just as the picture in the front of your bulletin depicts, and they are
panicked because Benjamin is another favorite son, the loss of whom will break their
father’s heart once again, something they have already experienced when they came
back with that bloodied coat of many colors, claiming that they had simply found it. In
front of this stranger, one of the Jacob’s son, Judah, offers to take Benjamin’s place I
prison. Finally, the charade is over, and Joseph can’t take it anymore, the pretense
has become too much of a burden—you can almost sense Joseph quaking with
emotion, as he sends all of his Egyptian assistants out of the room, as our text before
us today says. And then camp the deep weeping, the sobs that come from the soul of
a human being, so loud were that his servants could hear him in the other rooms. And
still, the brothers don’t know what is going on, what is happening—they must have been
so confused, especially as they too were reeling from the plea that Judah put before
Joseph—“let me go in his place!”   And then amidst the sobbing Joseph tells them who
he is, he reveals himself to them, and then he asks a question about his father—is he
still alive?—but his brothers are scared, confused, not sure about what is happening
and so he tells them to come forward, to come closer so that they can see that it really
is him, and again, he names himself, just to be sure that they realized that they hadn’t
heard his name wrong, that it was really him.   But then Joseph says something
perplexing something intriguing, something maybe even disturbing, he says: “But now
do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God
sent me before you to preserve life.”

“Brothers, there is meaning in it all,” Joseph seems to be saying to them, “there was a
purpose, a reason for what happened to me, and what happened to us.” There was
some sort of divine purpose in what happened those many years ago at that well, and
that all the years that followed, even the years full of suffering, loneliness,
imprisonment. All of it had worked together so as to ensure that Egypt and the nations
of that region would not starve to death as a famine swept the area, that human life
itself would be preserved, would be saved, all flowing out of that horrible moment of
betrayal at that lonely well in the desert.

Now, I have to admit that I have always struggled with what Joseph says here, mostly
because I think sometimes people use it to bring meaning to moments that are really
meaningless, that we often attempt to drag purpose and meaning out of moments in
our lives that are just horrible and nothing else. God didn’t take a child from us in order
to teach us a lesson, and God didn’t cause the Holocaust to happen to the Jews in
order to get the Jews to populate Palestine and form Israel, as the preacher John
Hagee has claimed recently. The kind of God that would deliberately cause something
like the murder of 7 million people in order to get people to move from one place to
another…well, that is not a God I am interested in, and is simply a brute and unworthy
of worship. Likewise, a God who must brutalize us to get us to listen to something God
is trying to say to us—that is simply abuse, plain and simple.

But I don’t think that is what Joseph means in this moment—what his brothers did to him
was wrong, really wrong, and it should have not have been done, and it was not in God’
s plan to have Joseph go through hell and back in order to make sure the grain
cylinders of Egypt would be full for the upcoming famine. What I do think is that God
took something so horrible as that betrayal of Joseph by his brothers, and used it
towards something greater, something better for Joseph’s life and something better for
the people he loved and served. That is what God does in our lives, I think—God takes
our crucifixions, those things, those moments of pain and hurt, those moments of being
in Egypt, that place that is foreign land, emotionally and spiritually, those moments that
simply seem to be part of the human condition—I think God takes those moments in our
lives, those moments in our own wells, and transforms them into resurrection. Of
course, Joseph had to choose to be part of that resurrection, he had to choose to see
something more than the betrayal, than that hurt, than that pain—he had to look for
those traces of his God in his life in Egypt, that place that was not home. He had to
decide whether or not the end of the story was going to be about crucifixion or whether
it was going to be about resurrection, and he, wisely, chose a story about resurrection.

And yet he could have gone in the other direction, especially in that moment when he
saw his brothers approach him for help with food, them not knowing that it was from
their betrayed brother that they were requesting help. Oh, the possibility of delicious
revenge was right there, right there for the taking. But he didn’t go there…the
experience of being in Egypt hadn’t taught him to be bitter, it hadn’t taught him how to
be merciless and without pity because others had been merciless without pity for him.
No, it had taught him the opposite, to be forgiving and merciful. And what so interesting
is that he uses his position, a position that came to him only because of what he had
gone through in that well, in that prison, in that courtyard, in order to help his family,
and, interestingly enough, to see what the passing years had taught his brothers. And
its clear that they too had learned something—clearly they knew they had done wrong,
that their jealousy had wrecked so many lives, and now, with Benjamin about to be lost,
one of them even was willing to take his place rather than go through it again—finally,
someone was willing to do the right thing. You see, they too had been in an Egypt of
sorts, in a foreign and difficult land trying to make their way out of the mess they found
themselves in, the one they had made, trying to start life over again.

But we’ve all been captive in Egypt in different parts of our lives, at different moments
of our lives—we’ve all been placed in situations we could not control, or if we could
control it earlier, we can’t control it now, and it seems like a continual train wreck. But
you know what’s so amazing about this story?   I think it’s that not only does Egypt
represents the place of captivity, of pain, of lost, it also represents the place of
redemption, of starting over again, of doing something new and unexpected. It is where
Joseph takes his crucifixion and turns it into resurrection, and it is also the place where
the brothers and the father receive back a long lost son and brother. Egypt may be the
place of slavery, but it also can become the place of freedom.

There is an old story that the Jewish rabbis tell about the bones of Jacob, who is
eventually reunited with his son Joseph in Egypt. You see, Jacob lived his final years
with Joseph in Egypt and then he died, and it was the custom of the Israelites to take
the bones back to the family plot in Israel. It is said that on the way back to the
homeland, Joseph and his brothers passed by the well that the brothers had thrown
poor Joseph down years earlier. On passing that well, Joseph made a blessing over
that pit, the place that others had originally meant to be his tomb. Years later Joseph
can see the blessing that came out of that horrible and painful time—a blessing born
out of hard work and a choice to seek the light out of that experience rather than the
dark. I know I’ve done that a couple of times, that is, bless the well that was meant to
be my tomb, knowing that the experience changed my life for the good, despite the pain
of being in that dark and terrible, place. It took years and years to get to that point—
these things take time sometimes, to get that point in our lives where we see the bigger
picture and how the time in the well, the time in Egypt, saved our life and the lives of
others years later. (Moyers, Genesis 341)

It is that way with John Ames, the Congregationalist minister who is the narrator of the
novel we’ve been reading together on Wednesday nights—it took him years to get to
the point of blessing a particularly difficult person in his life. John Ames has struggled
for decades with the painful truth that he does not like nor trust the son of his best
friend, a Presbyterian pastor, in the small town of Gilead, Kansas. What’s worse is that
his best friend’s son is named in honor of himself—he is the godfather of this child. He
has struggled with the painful realization that he has not been able to give his blessing
to a young man who had so often been cruel and heartless to his own family, much less
to a young woman in the community he left pregnant and without support. The novel
unfolds in such a way that there comes a reconciliation of sorts, and John Ames begins
to see his godson in a different way, especially as it is discovered why he finds himself
back in Gilead after many years of staying away. But now the boy’s father is dying,
Ames’ best friend, quite literally on his deathbed, as his daughter tends to his needs
during his last days. John comes to pay him a final visit to his best friend, a friendship
that has gone back to childhood, knowing that his son has already left, unable or
unwilling to stay for his father’s final moments. John Ames writes:

Poor Glory [his daughter] put a chair for me beside Boughton’s bed and I sat with him a
good while. I used to crawl in through the window so we could go fishing. His mother
would get cross if we woke her, too, so we were very stealthy. Sometimes he would just
not want to quit sleeping, and I’d pull on his hair and tug on his ear and whisper to him,
and if I thought of something ridiculous to say sometimes he’d wake up laughing. That
was so long ago. There he was yesterday evening, sleeping on his right side as he
always did, in the embrace of the Lord, I have no doubt, though I knew if I woke him up
he’d be back in Gethsemane, [that place of suffering]. So I said to him in his sleep, I
blessed that boy of yours for you. I still feel the weight of his brow on my hand. I said, I
love him as much as you meant me to. So certain of your prayers are finally answered,
old fellow. And mine too, mine too. We had to wait a long time, didn’t we? (Robinson,
Gilead 244)

Friends, sometimes it takes a lifetime to get to the moment when you can bless the well
that was meant to be your tomb, a lifetime to be able to bless your stay in Egypt, that
place of pain and yet maybe even promise as well.   So it is with John Ames and his
godson—45 years of disappointment, resentment, and misunderstanding give way to a
blessing, finally, after so many years. So it is with us, I think—we may take a lifetime to
get to our moments of being able to bless our time in Egypt, to bless our wells, but if we
open ourselves to the God who can take us out of the pit that was meant to be our
tomb, if we open ourselves to what can only be learned and experienced in Egypt, that
place of difficulty and challenge, then we may yet get the blessing we want so
desperately, though it may take a lifetime to get. As I have said over and over again
here, and I will continue to say, as long as these bones have life—the end of the story
is life, not death, the end of the story is resurrection, not crucifixion.   That is something
to remember when life rips out of the Promised Land and lands right into Egypt, that
land of both slavery and freedom. Amen.