Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 17, 2008

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The Bible, of course, is full of stories. Whatever else it may be, the Bible is one of the world’s great story books. Most of the time the stories stand pretty much by themselves. The Book of Genesis, for example, doesn’t try to tell us what the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden means. It leaves it up to us to find meaning in it, or to make meaning out of it. Sometimes, however, the Bible will try to tell us what a story or a parable means. A few weeks ago, for example, we heard Jesus’ parable of the sower and the seeds, where Jesus tells of seeds sown on different types of soil and what became of them. After he tells that parable Jesus tells us what it means. The Bible doesn’t give us explanations of its stories very often, but sometimes it does.

We have another example of the Bible telling us what one of its stories means in our reading from Genesis this morning. It’s part of the story of Joseph, the son of Jacob and great grandson of Abraham. The Joseph story, part of which we just heard, goes, in brief, like this: Joseph’s many brothers tried to kill him because they were both jealous of him and thought him arrogant and insolent, which he probably was.. Then, instead, they sold him to some Arab traders who took him to Egypt and sold him into slavery there. He ended up in Pharaoh’s household, where his natural abilities led to his rising to a position of power, essentially to being the ruler of Egypt in Pharaoh’s stead. Then famine hit the people back home in Canaan, and Joseph’s family and all the Israelites fled to Egypt, where the Nile River assured a reliable supply of food. In the part of the story we just heard, Joseph reveals himself to his brothers who had first tried to kill him and then sold him into slavery. They all have a teary reunion and reconciliation.

In this story, Joseph gives an explanation of the meaning of the story of his brothers selling him into slavery in Egypt and their then ending up there themselves as refugees fleeing famine. Joseph says to his brothers: “Do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.” Because God knew that there would be a long and severe famine in Canaan, Joseph believes that “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God.” Genesis 45:5-8a According to Joseph, then, it turns out that what looked like a despicable act of human treachery, betrayal, and violence was really God’s doing. God did it all so that Joseph could save his people when the famine came. That, Joseph says, is the meaning of what happened to him.

Clearly the author of this story, whoever he may have been, intends us to accept this understanding of the actions of Joseph’s brothers. It looked like it was the brothers acting badly. Actually, they didn’t do it at all. It was God’s doing! It looked like evil, but it was really God doing good! That’s the meaning Genesis wants us to take from the story.

And I have to say: I beg to differ! Now, I get where Joseph is coming from. I can understand why he might think of the matter this way. Making it all God’s doing for ultimate good surely made it easier for him to live with what his brothers did to him. It surely facilitated the reconciliation between Joseph and his brothers that we heard about in our reading this morning. I get why Joseph would explain what happened to him this way, but I just can’t agree with him.

I can’t agree with him because this explanation paints a picture of God that I cannot accept. It is a picture of God that does not correspond to the God Whom I know in my life and Whom I try, however imperfectly, to follow. What Joseph’s brothers did to him was evil pure and simple. Listen to the story again, this time in greater detail: At first, acting out of jealousy and hatred, Joseph’s brothers were going to kill him, throw him into a dry well, and tell their father that a wild animal had killed him. Because they were squeamish about actually spilling blood, however, they didn’t kill him outright but threw him into a dry well alive, where he could die without bleeding. Then when some Arab traders came by they saw a way both to get rid of Joseph and to make some money in the process. So the pulled him out of the well and sold him to the Arabs. Their intentions and their actions were evil pure and simple. The God that I know, a God of grace, love, mercy, and justice, never would engage and never has engaged in such evil, sinful acts for any purpose, not even good, life-preserving purposes. So I just can’t agree with Joseph that it was God who threw him into a well to die and then sold him into slavery in Egypt. His brothers did that. God didn’t.

Which leaves us to ask whether the story of Joseph being sold into slavery, then rising to a position from which he could save his people in a time of famine has any meaning for us. I doubt that it will surprise you when I say that I think it does—since I’m unlikely to be standing up here preaching on a story that I don’t think has any meaning for us. There is a lesson for us in Joseph’s story, but it isn’t that God does evil to effect good. It is rather that God can and does work for good even in evil circumstances. If I could rewrite the Joseph story—and I can because there’s no one to tell me I can’t—here’s what I would have Joseph say to his brothers instead of what he actually does say:

Now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sinned against me and against God when you laid violent hands on me with evil intent and sold me into bondage. Rather, repent; for God has brought good even out of your evil acts. There is famine in our homeland, but I can now preserve your life. You intended and did what was evil in the sight of God and of all humanity, but God now brings good out of the circumstances your evil created. That’s how it works with God. God works to bring good even out of evil acts like yours.

Now, that’s a meaning of the Joseph story that makes sense to me. That God is, after all, the God of Jesus Christ. God did not prevent evil from happening even to Jesus. Jesus’ unjust execution was not God’s will, much of popular Christianity to the contrary notwithstanding. It was a sinful act that God would never condone, much less commit. But God brought immense good out of that sinful act. God revealed God’s true nature to us through that sinful act. God revealed God’s unshakable solidarity with us through that sinful act. And God raised Jesus from the dead to defeat death and to show us that with God every tomb is empty and new life is always possible.

That’s a meaning of the Joseph story that paints a picture of God that is consistent with the God I know and worship. I know in my own life that God does not perpetrate evil acts. God does not cause tragedy. God does not cause vibrant, caring, giving people to die of dreadful diseases far too early in life. God does not cause us to lose loved ones far too soon. But I know because I have experienced it that God can and does bring new life even out of such tragedies. I know because I have experienced it that God can and does use such tragedies to reveal Godself to us, to reach to us, and to make us feel the saving embrace of God’s love.

No tragedy is too big for God to bring good out of. One of the biggest tragedies of modern history is, of course, the Holocaust. To suggest that God would ever engineer such an abomination for any purpose is pure blasphemy. Yet since humans did it, God has used that horror to awaken God’s Christian people to the sinfulness of anti-Semitism. God has used the Holocaust to create in God’s people the resolve that no such genocide will ever again go unnoticed and un-condemned, even when we can’t always stop them. God has used the utter devastation visited on Europe by World War II to create a Europe united and at peace with itself really for the first time in its history. God is using the unjust and unlawful invasion of Iraq by the Bush Administration, done with the complicity of both major political parties in Congress, to strengthen our resolve to change our country and to make it truly a force for peace and justice in the world.

God works always for peace and justice in the world. God’s work is often undetectable, but it is inexorable. God does not create evil; but, when God’s disobedient creatures create evil, God can and does work even in the most evil circumstances imaginable to bend the universe toward peace and justice. The author of the Joseph story in Genesis saw it differently. He thought God engineers evil acts when they are necessary to enable God to do a greater good. That’s fine. It doesn’t trouble me that an ancient author understood things that way, but that doesn’t mean that we have to understand them that way. Our God doesn’t engage in evil acts. Our God does, however, call us always to look for ways to turn evil into good, to enable God’s work of bringing good out of evil. That is the mission to which a better understanding of the Joseph story calls us. That is the mission to which the story of Jesus Christ calls us. With God’s grace we can do it. Amen.