Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 14, 2011

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.

How many of you remember the late great comedian Flip Wilson? I loved Flip Wilson and all of the crazy characters he created. One of the tag lines that some of those characters used, especially the sassy young woman Geraldine, was “The devil made me do it.” The way Wilson, or rather Geraldine, said it made it a great line, a sort of cheeky acknowledgement that may she shouldn’t have done something, but she was going to enjoy it anyway because it wasn’t my fault. As she said, the devil made me do it.

We have an ancient variation on that theme in our reading this morning from Genesis. Only this time it isn’t “the devil made me do it,” it’s “God made you do it.” Our passage brings us in near the end of a much longer and more complicated story. Joseph is one of the many sons of the patriarch Jacob. Earlier in the story, back home in Canaan, Joseph antagonizes his many brothers basically by being an arrogant jerk. So they decide to kill him. At the last minute they change their minds and sell him to some Arab traders whose caravan was passing by on the way to Egypt. So Joseph ends up as a slave in Egypt. There, in a wildly improbable development for which there is no historical evidence outside the Bible, he rises to a position of power in the household of the Pharaoh. He becomes basically the emperor’s deputy, ruling Egypt for him. Then there’s a famine back home in Canaan, and Joseph’s brothers, or most of them, come to Egypt to buy food for the people back home. Joseph deals with them, rather treacherously himself at first, but he doesn’t reveal to them who he is. Not, at least, until the part of the story we heard this morning.

Now, there’s a really big theological issue in that part of the story that we heard. Did you catch it? It’s in what Joseph says to his brothers as he reveals his identity to them. It’s in the contradictory things Joseph says about his brothers selling him into slavery. The first thing he says about is that his brothers did the dastardly deed. He says “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt.” Gen. 45:4, emphasis added. Here he acknowledges that it was indeed his brothers who betrayed him. But then he says something entirely different, and he says it several times. Joseph tells his brothers “do not be distressed or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.” Gen. 45:5 And again he says: “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth,.” that is, so that I could save you from the coming famine. Gen. 45:7 And again he says “So it was not your who sent me here, but God.” Gen. 45:8a

What are we to make of these contradictory statements, first that Joseph knows it was his brothers who sold him and then that it was really all God’s doing? Clearly Joseph knows that his brothers were actors in the drama that made him a slave in Egypt and put him in a position to save them from the famine, but he pretty clearly doesn’t think that they wrote the script. God did. Joseph thinks that God caused his brothers to engage in their act of violent treachery against him because God had a bigger plan in mind. In this story Joseph reconciles with his brothers, but he is able to do it only by saying to them “God made you do it.”

The really big theological issue that this story raises is the issue of God’s control of events on earth.