Really?

Really?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

August 20, 2017

Scripture: Genesis 45:1-15

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.

This is not the sermon I had intended to give this morning, but sometimes things happen that tell me I have to do something different than I had planned. Sometimes that’s something that happens in the life of the congregation. Sometimes it’s something that happens in my life. Most frequently it’s something that has happened in the world. Something we hear about on the news or read about in the paper or on line. That’s what happened this week. I had intended to give a sermon about God’s relationship with evil. That, after all, is basically what the story we just heard about Joseph and his brothers is about. Not that it gives the right answer to that question. I am convinced that it doesn’t. This is still a sermon about God’s relationship to evil. It is also a sermon about what God tells us our relationship to evil should be.

We have seen a lot of evil in the news in last couple of weeks. White supremacists, people filled with anger and hatred who blame people who don’t look like them for the problems in their lives, bring violence to the streets of a lovely university town in Virginia. One of them drives his car into a crowd of peaceful counter-protesters, injuring several and killing one of them, a women who was just trying to cross the street. These hate filled American fascists chant anti-Jewish slogans and want to return us to the days of Jim Crow if not actually to the days of slavery. Some of them claim to be Christians, but they actually are anything but. Then President Trump blames the violence perpetrated by the racists on both sides. He praises what he calls “beautiful Confederate monuments.” He seems utterly unaware that during the Civil War the Confederacy was treasonous toward the United States and was fighting to preserve the brutal, sinful institution of slavery. He seems utterly unaware that most of those Confederate monuments weren’t put up until decades after the Civil War and that they were put up precisely as symbols of white supremacy. He seems utterly unaware that Robert E. Lee, the traitor from Virginia, opposed putting up such monuments after the war. In his remarks after the terror of Charlottesville President Trump gave succor to racists and fascists. In those remarks he violated virtually every moral principal that our nation claims to espouse.

The evil we have seen in recent days is not limited to the US. North Korea threatens to strike Guam, an American possession, with nuclear weapons. President Trump responds with bellicose talk that could only make the situation worse. North Korea seems to have backed down on that threat, but it is still a rogue nation with nuclear weapons, an unmitigated evil in the world. On Thursday someone drove a van onto a crowded sidewalk in Barcelona, Spain, and killed 14 people and wounded dozens more. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. Terrorist attacks like this one have tragically become a common part of the life of the world, indeed even a normal one. Many of the people who perpetrate them claim to be Muslims. They claim to be acting in the name of Allah, that is, in the name of God. Islam actually condemns their actions unequivocally, but never mind. Terror is part of our world, and various kinds of people commit it.

Folks, the evil around us feels frankly overwhelming. In times like these so many people ask, or rather cry out the question, where is God in all this? Is God doing it? Is God causing people to do it? Why doesn’t God stop it? If God is Almighty like we always say God is, why doesn’t God stop all the evil that occurs in the world? If I had really good answers to those questions I’d be rich and famous. People of faith have been seeking answers to questions like that for millennia, and at least in the monotheistic traditions we’ve never really found any. We don’t have good answers, but we sure have some bad ones. Our story of Joseph and his brothers gives one of the bad ones. As we wrestle with the question of evil in our world it will be worthwhile, I hope, to look closely at that story and what it says about how God relates to evil.

In that story Joseph is the youngest, or one of the two youngest, sons of the patriarch Jacob. He is the son of the wife Jacob really loved, Rachel. Jacob loves him more than he loves any of his other children, and he had a lot of children. Although Joseph becomes the hero of the story, he could be quite the jerk. In part of the story that the lectionary doesn’t give us he keeps telling his brothers about dreams that he has had that suggest that one day he will rule over his brothers, and they would bow down to him. Perhaps understandably, the older brothers don’t take kindly to this kind of arrogance on the part of their younger brother. So while they are all out in the field tending the sheep they plot to kill Joseph. They throw him into a dry cistern, probably an underground vat for holding water, or maybe just a dry well. When they see a caravan of traders headed for Egypt pass by they pull Joseph out of the cistern and sell him to the traders as a slave. The traders take Joseph to Egypt, where they sell him. Joseph ends up on the household of the pharaoh, and, rather unbelievably actually, pharaoh eventually puts him in charge of the whole kingdom of Egypt. Joseph stores up a vast amount of grain against a future famine. Famine hits back in Canaan, and Joseph’s family end up in Egypt seeking food. Joseph feeds them, and eventually he reveals himself to them. They all make up with hugs and tears.

In this story Joseph’s brothers committed unspeakable evil against their brother. There appears to be nothing good at all about what they did to him. First they tried to kill him. Then they sold him into slavery in a foreign land instead. Their actions are pure evil. There’s no excusing what the brothers did to Joseph no matter how much Joseph annoyed them. Yet something very good came out of it. Joseph was able to save his family from famine only because his brothers had sold him into slavery in Egypt. Yes, he made the most out of his tragic fate, but he was able to save his family only because he had been sold as a slave in that foreign land.

In this story the Bible wrestles with the question of where God was in all that happened. Did God have a role in what happened, and if so what was it? The answer to these questions it comes up with is that God was the real actor in the story all along. This story has Joseph say to his brothers after he reveals himself to them “do not be distressed, and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God send me ahead of you.” And “God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.” And “So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God.” The story says that the apparent evil the brothers perpetrated against Joseph really wasn’t evil at all because it wasn’t even really them doing it. God did it, and God did it for a good purpose that has now been fulfilled. The story doesn’t deny that what the brothers did sure looks like evil. It can’t, because by any decent standard what they did was evil. But the story says it wasn’t really evil. It was the providential work of God. This story has it that God engaged in an act of profound evil in order to bring about a beneficial result.

And I have to be honest here. Every time I hear the Bible saying that God has perpetrated some evil, even if it be for a good purpose, I say: Really? God really did that? I mean, did God really cause a group of young men to, as far as they knew, destroy their brother’s life just because they didn’t like him? We can ask the same questions today. Is God causing the rise of neo-Nazism among us? Is God behind the rise of racist white nationalism? It God behind our President’s wholly inadequate and even damaging response to what’s going on? Is God causing people who claim to be Muslims to kill innocent people? The story of Joseph suggests that the answer to those questions is or at least could be yes. Yes, God did it. Maybe God did it for some good ulterior purpose, but God did it. That’s what the story of Joseph wants us to believe.

Well, I don’t. To accept the Bible’s interpretation of the events here is to say that an ethic we were all taught as kids is just wrong is actually OK, at least if God’s the one doing it. The justification of God’s actions in the story of Joseph and his brothers basically comes down to “the ends justify the means.” God’s end, the preservation of Jacob’s family, justifies God’s means, the evil acts Joseph’s brothers perpetrated against him. Well, maybe in the ancient world that produced this story that kind of thinking was acceptable. Today, to me at least, it isn’t. Beyond that, I just can’t believe that the God I know and love and seek to serve would perpetrate such evil even if God had a very good end in mind. I mean, if God wanted Joseph to end up ruling Egypt so he could save his family when famine hit, surely God could have done it without inflicting great evil on him. So as for me, I cannot accept that God really was the active force behind the brothers’ brutal treatment of Joseph.

Like I said at the beginning of this sermon, all kinds of bad things are happening. I do not and cannot believe that God is inflicting those bad things on us. I do however see God working in and through those bad things in a couple of ways. First of all, God acts in the bad things that happen in our lives simply by being present in them with us. That’s one really important and powerful way that God acts in the bad things that happen to us. Yet perhaps even more important and more powerful than that is the way God has of bringing good things out of bad things. God often seems to see the bad things that happen on earth as occasions for bringing something good to life. That’s how I understand the story of Joseph and his brothers. Given that Joseph’s brothers acted so sinfully toward him, God used the bad that had happened to Joseph to bring about something good. I understand this story to say that God used the evil and brutality of Joseph’s brothers to set up the family’s salvation in Egypt when famine hit at home. I have no idea how God is able to do that, but I have no doubt that God does.

So as we face all the really bad stuff that’s happening in the world, let’s look for the ways God may be bringing good out of them. Charlottesville has brought a great many Americans to an awareness of an evil among us that we didn’t see before, and a great many people have stood up and spoken up against racism. Perhaps our President’s moral failings in facing that crisis will lead our country to reevaluate the Presidency and to think harder than we usually do about what sort of person we want in the post. I can’t foresee all the ways in which something good might come from all the evil we see, but I know God is looking for them. God is hatching plans. God is moving as God always does, quietly, gently, behind the scenes, to move God’s people toward the good.

And of course God calls all of us to action. This is not a time when Christians can be silent. This is not a time when we can sit inside the walls of our church and be concerned only about our personal needs. Yes, we have personal needs. And yes, our faith can meet those needs. But these days call for a larger vision. These days call the church into the world and the world into the church. That’s because justice is under attack, and Christianity is all about justice. Jesus was about justice for the poor, the weak, the marginalized, the excluded; and Christians must be about justice too. That is especially true in days like these. So speak up. Write your Senators and Congressional representatives. Demand that our government stand up for justice in a way it is certainly not doing today. Join a demonstration. Talk to your friends about God’s justice for all people. If we will do things like that we can part of God’s work in bringing something good out of all the evil we see. Can God do that? Yes, God can. Really. Amen.