God Is As God Does

 Exodus 3:1-15

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Last week I was sitting at my desk working away when my cellphone rang.  It was a local number so I figured I’d better answer.  The voice on the other end said, “What do you want?”  I said, “Excuse me.”  He said, “I just had a call on my phone from your number.”  I said, “I haven’t called anybody this morning.”  He said, “You had to of.”  I said, “But I didn’t.  Who is this?”  He said, “Matthew.”  I said, “I don’t know a Matthew.”  Then I gave him a jumbled up version of my cell number and asked him if that was the number he called.  He took a few moments and then said, “Yeah.”  I said, “Well, I didn’t call you.  That’s weird.”  Matthew said, “Yeah, it is.”  I said, “Well, you have a good one.”  Matthew said, “Yeah, you too.”  The call ended.

It is strange when somebody calls you out of the blue like that.  In these days of identity theft we need to be really careful how much information we give to anybody particularly over the phone.  We live in an Age of Suspicion I would call it.  For all I knew, Matthew could have been a scammer trying to phish information out of me.  Yet, I find it interesting that he gave me his name.  In the world of conversation dynamics, that put the ball in my court.  Getting his name now meant that I knew more about him than he knew about me.  It put me in control.  In fact, if you want to get under the skin of a telemarketer, start asking for personal information.  If he gets grumpy, just explain you need to know information about him to help you decide whether you can trust him enough to buy something from him over the phone.  When you get people to give you personal information, you start gaining control over them.  Some people might call it familiarity or gaining trust, but it’s still control.  That’s why you never give personal information to someone you don’t know over the phone, especially your name and never use the words “yes” or “okay”, anything that would indicate you’re giving permission for something.

Well, looking here at the conversation that Moses and God had and pretend it's like one of those out-of-the-blue phone calls like what I described a moment ago.  In essence God cold-called Moses by means of a bush that was on fire but wasn’t being consumed and Moses couldn’t resist answering, so to speak.  Moses turned aside and went to see what this spectacle was.  When he drew near, a voice called him by name, “Moses.  Moses.”  The caller already knew who he was – not good.  Moses responds, “Here I am, Lord.  It is I Lord.  I have heard you calling from the bush.”  God says, “Stop right there.  Take off your shoes.  You’re on holy ground.”  Then, God tells him what company he’s working for, so to speak.  “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”  (I’ve always wondered why Joseph wasn’t on that list.)  Moses is face down on the ground in fear now.  I had a recorded message phone call the other day saying someone had suspiciously used my credit card at 5:00 that morning.  I didn’t call them back at that number.  I checked my account online.  Scary.  So also, God had sufficiently freaked out Moses.

Well, God is pretty straightforward with telling Moses what he wanted him to do: Go to Egypt and tell ole Pharaoh “Let my people go.”  Notice how Moses initial response to God of willingness to serve, “Here I am” changes to self-doubt, “who am I that you would send me?”  Well, Moses was a Hebrew boy who had miraculously escaped Pharaoh’s command to kill all Hebrew boys.  In a strange turn of events he wound up being adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised in Pharaoh’s house as an Egyptian prince.  At present, he was on the lam because he had killed two Egyptian taskmasters who were beating his fellow Hebrews.  Moses didn’t want to go back and face Pharaoh, who was likely his adopted uncle.  When Moses questions God saying “Who am I”, I don’t think he’s trying to say, “I’m not worthy.” I very well may be that Moses is saying, “I’m not your guy.  Going back there is a death sentence.”

God tried to calm Moses’s doubts and fears by promising to be with him.  But apparently, God having his back wasn’t assurance enough.  So, Moses starts to phish God for some of God’s personal information.  He creates the scenario that when he goes back to his people to tell them the God of their ancestors has heard their cries and was now going to deliver them out of Egypt they will ask him for the name of this God.  After all, the Egyptian gods had names.  Why shouldn’t the God of their ancestors?  In a world of many gods which one was their God?

The professor of my Old Testament I class in seminary gave us a good explanation as to what was going on in this conversation.  He seemed to think that Moses was just trying to cook up a story to get God to tell him God’s name.  Back then they believed that if you could get a god or a spirit to reveal its name, then by having their name you gained the power to invoke their power on your own behalf.  It seems it wasn’t enough that God promised to go with Moses.  Moses also wanted to be able to invoke God’s power on his own behalf.  

I want you to keep something in mind here.  God was acting totally out of character for a god.  Gods did not just up and decide to do good for humans what God was promising to do for his people.  Gods didn’t just typically up and decide to be compassionate or promise to be with you.  Gods kept their distance and did what they wanted and couldn’t readily be relied upon.  Humans were at the whims of the gods.  The idea of a god being steadfastly loving and faithful to human beings was preposterous in the least. No wonder Moses would try to get God’s name.  He needed it, he believed, to get this uncharacteristic God to keep his word.

God totally outsmarted Moses and answered him in an absolutely brilliant way.  God gave him the name “I am who I am. You tell them ‘I am sent me to you.’”  God said his name was “I am who I am”.  In Hebrew that’s just one word, the first person form of the verb “to be”.  It’s pronounced “Yahweh”.  In most translations wherever you see the word LORD with all capital letters, that’s how they translate “Yahweh”.  They don’t write the name out of respect for the branches of the Jewish faith who believe the name should not be pronounced.  

(Also, just for the sake of your knowing it.  In John’s Gospel there are several places where Jesus makes “I am” statements.  “I am the Way, Truth, and the Life.”  “I am the Resurrection and the Life.”  “I am the Bread of Life.”  Jesus was very much calling himself God by doing that.  Just thought you would like to know.)

As God’s wiliness demonstrates, God does not play the name game and will not be controlled by ritualistic magic.  God does not want to be known by name.  Rather, it is more accurate that God wants to be known by his actions.  God is as he does.  Yet, as names often have deeper meanings implied, the name God gives here “I am who I am” does say something about him: God is free to be and do as God pleases.  Actually, what God chooses to be for his people is remarkably revealed in Moses’s name.  The name “Moses” means “to draw out and save”.  It was Pharaoh’s daughter who named him that because she drew him out of the Nile and saved him.  Thusly, by means of Moses God will draw his people out of Egypt and save them from slavery. God then also told Moses that he would know who God is when the day comes that Moses and God’s people worship God on that very mountain where they were having this conversation.  When that day finally did come, God introduced himself to his people by saying what he did for them, “I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”

God is known by his actions, by what he does.  Walter Brueggemann is probably the foremost Old Testament scholar of the last 50 years.  In his great big book on Old Testament theology he makes the point of saying that when the Israelite people talked about God they didn’t start with nouns and adjectives like God is love or God is all-knowing.  They started with verbs – the action words.  God creates.  God saves.  Our passage this morning, this conversation between God and Moses, is a wonderful bit of ancient Israelite theology about who God is.  There are a lot of verbs. God sees the misery of his people.  God hears their cries.  God knows their sufferings.  God comes down to deliver them, to set them free.  God leads his people out to safety.  God sends people to lead.  God is with his people.  The most wonderful bit of God’s self-revelation in this passage isn’t so much that God gave himself a name, Yahweh – I am who I am.  It’s all the things he says he will do for his people.  We know God by what he does for us.

So also we can say these same things about who God is for us, his people today.  Our God sees the realities of our lives.  God hears our crying out to him.  God knows how we feel.  God gets up off his duff and comes to be with us in order to do something about setting us free to live the fullness of life that God has promised us.  We don’t need to do things like bargain with God to get him to help us.  Come what may he is already with us.  He knows, he feels what we’re going through.  He sees.  He hears our cries our prayers.  These verbs paint a picture of God as being very compassionate and hands on.  God is for us.  No matter what we do or don’t do, God never stops being who he is towards us.  God is as he does – He sees our hurts, hears our cries, and feels what we feel.  He gets up and comes to be with us.  He sets us free of what oppresses us.  He leads us to the green pastures and still waters.  God is as he does – just a little something for us to keep in mind.  Amen.

 

A Few Important Women

 Exodus 1:8-2:10

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In my Old Testament Survey class in seminary there were two names that my professor wanted us to know.  He told us to memorize those names, know how to spell them, know what they did, and be able to write an essay on their significance.  The names were not of your typical powerful and important Bible characters that everybody knows their story; like Abraham and Sarah or David and Bathsheba or Solomon and the Queen of Sheba or Deborah and Jael (those two might challenge the best of you Bible Trivia enthusiasts).  These two names were of two very important people that I had actually never paid much mind to.  Even with a university degree in Bible and Theology, and having read the Bible more than a time or two, I had not a clue who those two people were until that fateful lecture in Old Testament I.  Hopefully, by the end of this sermon, you will commit these names to memory and be able to say why they are so important.

Well, the people concerned are Shiphrah and Puah, the two Hebrew midwives who disobeyed Pharaoh’s command to kill all the Hebrew boy babies at their birthing.  The names themselves have meaning: Shiphrah means “fairness” and Puah means “to scatter or overflow” like a nest of caterpillars.  They will start out small and grow and overflow the nest and then scatter.  So, if there’s meaning in a name, then in the case of these two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, it is do the fair thing and the people will overflow.

You may have noticed as I read the passage that besides Moses there at the very end these are the only two names mentioned.  Pharaoh is not named, or his daughter, or even Moses’s parents and sister.  The writer of this story only mentions Shiphrah and Puah by name, two midwives among the Hebrew people.  They are significant for their faithfulness to God at a time when a powerful man was designing evil against the people of God for fear of them, fear of how God had blessed them, fear that if Egypt should be attacked such a numerous people would join with the enemies to overturn Egypt.  It’s the type of fear that led to the internment of people of Japanese descent during WWII here in Canada.  It’s the type of fear certain people in North America feel about having people of Middle Eastern and Islamic background living in their midst and the lengths to which such people have gone to ban their immigration of such people to North America. Such fear is the root of racism.

We might could call Shiphrah and Puah the mothers of civil disobedience.  They put themselves at personal risk – they risked their very lives to stand against this ungrateful Pharaoh who thought he was a god and his abuse of power.  We don’t know which Pharaoh this was.  The person who wrote this story down did not see fit that he be remembered.  In a way he stands for all those rich powerful men who think they are gods and can do anything they want.  Shiphrah and Puah show us how to handle such men, just don’t do what they want.

The one thing the writer does tell us about this Pharaoh was that he didn’t know Joseph.  Apparently, he felt he owed nothing to the man or the people of the man who made Pharaoh and his family the most powerful man and family in Egypt.  It was Joseph’s doings that made it so that whoever was Pharaoh owned everything and everybody in Egypt, except for the Hebrew people.  This Pharaoh didn’t care that the sons of Israel, the family of Jacob, were free in Egypt because of Joseph establishing the power and wealth of Pharaoh.  This Pharaoh just saw a group of people that were not Egyptian living independent in his land and becoming quite numerous and that threatened him though it need not.  So, he ruthlessly enslaved the Hebrew people.  But, they people persevered and continued to grow.  If Pharaoh had no reason to worry before, by his actions he certainly created one.  When you enslave a people, deny them rights and freedoms, it only serves to create a situation where they will rise up.

Pharaoh’s next step in his plan to do away with the Hebrew threat was to attempt genocide by infanticide – the systematic murder of babies.  The same thing happened when Jesus was born when King Herod ordered all the boys of a certain age in Bethlehem be murdered in an attempt to kill God’s Messiah.  Pharaoh ordered Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives to murder the Hebrew boys as soon as they are born.  That would be an unconscionable thing to do, but the writer of the story doesn’t tell us that unconscionableness was the reason they disobeyed Pharaoh.  They disobeyed Pharaoh due to their faithfulness to God.  They feared God not Pharaoh.  Shiphrah and Puah’s “civil disobedience” was the beginning of God’s undoing of Pharaoh.  The greatest threat to the power of a man who thinks he is god, is people who don’t bow in fear to him and at risk to themselves do what is right in the eyes of God.  

Realizing he was getting nowhere with Shiphrah and Puah, Pharaoh turned to his own people, the Egyptian people, and ordered them to throw any Hebrew boy they came across into the Nile to drown him.  There is no indication how well the Egyptian people obeyed Pharaoh’s command.  His own daughter certainly did not.  But it does seem that the situation was bad enough that Moses’s mother had to keep him hidden.  Then when he was too much of a toddler, she took this drastic measure of rigging up a basket boat and putting him in the reeds of the Nile and turning the matter over to God.  

The story doesn’t say so but I am inclined to think she knew that Pharaoh’s daughter liked to bathe in the area were she put Moses.  I like to think she knows that she might be able to move the princess with compassion upon seeing the baby; and that’s exactly what happened.  Pharaoh’s daughter went to the river to bathe.  She heard the baby crying in the nearby reeds and sent her maid to get him.  She saw that he was one of the Hebrew boys and instead of throwing him into the Nile to drown him, she had compassion for him and decided to save him.  Then, quite conveniently Moses’s sister popped up and said “I know a wet nurse who will nurse him for you” and the princess agrees.  That “for you” speaks volumes.  Suddenly, Pharaoh’s daughter has adopted the child.  The girl brings Moses’s mother and Pharaoh’s daughter tells her to nurse the child “for me” and even agrees to pay her wages to do so.   That’s adoption.  When Moses is weaned she takes him to Pharaoh’s daughter to be raised in the house of Pharaoh.  

Now here’s irony; the name Moses means “to draw out”.  Pharaoh’s daughter named him Moses because she drew him out of the Nile.  Ironically, he will grow up to be the one who draw’s the Hebrew people out of Egypt.  Here’s some more irony: the one whom God would call to be the deliverer of the Hebrew people from Pharaoh was raised in the house of Pharaoh by his own daughter because she was moved with compassion and could not leave the boy to die in the Nile.  If you want an example of God moving in mysterious ways, well you got it. I can’t imagine how Pharaoh himself must have responded when he found out his own daughter had brought home a Hebrew boy to be her son, his grandson.

Well, where was God in all this?  It is interesting to note that as soon as Pharaoh enslaved the Hebrew people God began working to deliver them.  We sometimes get the impression that God wasn’t watching over his people all that closely and it wasn’t until their crying out got so loud that he called Moses, which we will talk about next week.  But, that’s not the case.  The picture we get here is that as soon as this Pharaoh started to act ruthlessly act against God’s provision for his people in Egypt that he established through Joseph, God went to work by means of people standing on faith and acting according to compassion, people like Shiphrah and Puah and also Pharaoh’s daughter, and let us not forget the resourcefulness and bravery of Moses’s mother to keep her son alive.  

We live in crazy times.  We’ve got this pandemic oppressing us.  The global political situation is a scary, unpredictable mess; particularly with an election campaign kicking in for our domestically well-armed neighbours to the south.  There’s so much fear-mongering and misinformation being carelessly floated about by people and institutions we are supposed to be able trust.  Racism and fear of foreigners are among us. Just a few days ago a couple of teen-agers in a Nova Scotia campground threateningly waved a noose at a racially mixed family.  The police said they couldn’t do anything about it because the boys never actually said anything.  Since when have actions not spoken louder than words.

In these crazy times we may be asking where’s God?  What’s God doing about all this craziness?  Well, if we take this story as any indication, God’s got plans for a better state of the world than what we had and certainly a better state of the world than the one we’re living in at present.  Just as I God started to act the moment Pharaoh forgot Joseph and turned on God’s people, so we can rest assured that God has been at work to bring about his plan for things to be better.  But, we should not look for a Moses-type person just yet.  We shouldn’t look for some powerful man making promises to make things great again or to clean up the mess.  We might rather want to look at what women are doing, look for the Shiphrah’s and Puah’s in our communities and throughout the world, women who for a matter of faith stand against the tyrants and fear-mongers; women like Pharaoh’s daughter who act with compassion; women who are resourceful and brave women like Moses’s mother and sister; women who will commit to nurturing the future generation and doing what’s best for the children rather than themselves.  It may be and it’s likely that God is with us through such as these.  Amen. 

 

Difficult Questions on the Success of Joseph

 Genesis 45:1-15; 50:15-21

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So, what became of Joseph and his dreams?  As you remember he was a precocious, sort of snotty young man of seventeen, a dreamer, the favourite son of his father, Jacob; yet, his brothers hated him…and hated is putting it mildly.  This highly dysfunctional family dynamic of favouritism was complicated even more by the plans it seems that God had for Joseph that would involve his brothers bowing down to him.  Remember those two dreams Joseph had?  One was that he and his brothers were making wheat sheaves.  His sheaf stood up and their sheaves bowed down to his.  The second dream was of the sun, moon, and eleven stars bowing down to him.  They believed such dreams to be God-given visions of God’s future plan for Joseph and his family.  But,…Joseph’s brothers hated him so much that they even conspired to murder him to keep God’s plan from ever happening.  In our reading last week, the opportunity presented itself and fortunately they reduced their plan to just kill him outright to simply selling him to Ishmaelite slave traders who were headed to Egypt. It would seem they might have even thwarted God’s grand plan for Joseph and them.  Now for the rest of the story.

The Ishmaelites sold Joseph to an Egyptian named Potiphar who was Pharaoh’s captain of the guard.  Being gifted as he was, Joseph quickly rose through the ranks in Potiphar’s household to where Potiphar put him in charge of the whole house, second only to Potiphar himself.  The Bible says that Potiphar could see that the LORD was with Joseph and blessed everything he did.  In just months Joseph went from being betrayed by his brothers and left in the bottom of a pit to being the household head for one of the most powerful men in Egypt.

But alas, nothing good comes without its complications.  In this case it was Potiphar’s wife.  She had her own plans for Joseph that a dishonourable man would have leapt at, but not Joseph.  He could not be disloyal to Potiphar who had been so good to him.  The situation came to a head one day when Potiphar’s wife got Joseph alone and threw herself at him.  He nobly fled the seen but unfortunately his robe did not.  (Joseph and his robes!)  She had torn his robe from him.  In her anger screamed and told her guards that the Hebrew man Joseph had assaulted her and she had the evidence in hand.  Potiphar put Joseph in jail.  A real rags to riches to rags story.  Steve Martin would be proud.  

Joseph stayed in jail for over two years.  The LORD was with him there and prospered everything he did.  The LORD caused him to find favour with the chief jailor and he rose in rank among the prisoners.  He also discovered that God had gifted him with the ability to interpret dreams.  Joseph the dreamer can now say what dreams mean.  

There were two prisoners under Joseph’s charge who had dreams that needed interpretation.  They both had been former servants of Pharaoh, one was his cupbearer and the other was his baker.  The cupbearer dreamt of a vine with three branches that budded, blossomed, and bore fruit.  He was holding Pharaoh’s cup so he smashed grapes into and gave it to Pharaoh.  Joseph interpreted the dream to mean that in three days he would be serving Pharaoh again.  Joseph made him promise that when things were well with him again that he would tell Pharaoh of Joseph and how he was wrongfully stolen from his homeland and sold into slavery and then imprisoned wrongfully.  The Baker, he dreamt he had three baskets of cakes on his head and birds were eating from the highest one.  Joseph told him that in three days Pharaoh would hang him and birds would eat him.  In three days time, it was Pharaoh’s birthday and he had the two men released.  He restored the cupbearer and hanged the baker.  Unfortunately, the cupbearer did not remember Joseph.

Well, two years pass and it happens that Pharaoh himself has a couple of disturbing dreams.  The first was of seven sleek and fat cows grazing when seven ugly and thin cows rise out of the Nile to consume them.  The second was of seven blighted ears of grain consuming seven plump ears of grain on the same stalk.  The dreams troubled Pharaoh so he called his magicians but they didn’t have a clue about them and that’s when the cupbearer finally remembered Joseph and told Pharaoh of his ability to interpret dreams.

Pharaoh sent for Joseph and told him his dreams.  Joseph interpreted them.  There will be seven years of bumper crops in Egypt followed by seven years of famine.  He then advised Pharaoh to appoint someone to take charge of putting aside grain over the next seven years so that they would have food to eat in Egypt during the famine.  Discerning this was the doings of Joseph’s God, Pharaoh appointed Joseph to that task and made Joseph his second-in-command.  Oddly, there’s no narrator’s note here of the LORD being with Joseph blessing and prospering him.  Joseph was now thirty.  Thirteen years had passed since that cold day in the pit when his brothers sold him.

The seven years of plenty pass and the famine came and soon people from all over Mesopotamia come to Egypt to buy food.  Joseph makes Pharaoh a very rich man.  In that seven years pretty much everyone in Egypt had sold themselves to Pharaoh to be his slave in exchange for food and they were all under Joseph’s authority.

Just a side note about how things change over time: Joseph, the Hebrew sold into slavery by his brothers, became the head master of the institution of slavery in Egypt.  In 400 years, the role of slave and master flip-flopped so that the Egyptians enslave the whole nation of the Hebrew people.

Moving closer to the context of this morning’s passage, Joseph’s brothers hear that there is grain in Egypt and they convince Jacob to let them go and buy some.  Jacob let’s them all go except Joseph’s younger brother Benjamin.  He  couldn’t bear to lose his second son by Rachel, the wife of his four that he loved; the love that was the source of that unhealthy dynamic of favouritism in the family.  

In Egypt, Joseph recognized them but they don’t recognize him.  Joseph now has the power and opportunity to exact revenge on his brothers for what they did to him, but amazingly doesn’t.  Instead, he starts to play head games.  He gets them to admit that they all of the family. There’s still a younger brother and their father and another brother who had died.  He accuses them of being spies and puts them in prison for a couple of days, a small taste of what he went through.  But enough is enough.  Joseph agrees to sell them food, but makes them leave one brother behind until they return with their youngest brother.  The brothers begin to talk among themselves saying God was now punishing them for what they did to Joseph.  Joseph sends them back with full sacks and, unbeknownst them, the money they gave him for it and tells them don’t come back unless they bring the other brother with them.  And wouldn’t you know it…the whole exchange involves Joseph’s brothers bowing to him over and over just like the dream said.

A year goes by.  The brothers have to go back to Egypt for more food and they convince Jacob to let Benjamin go too in hopes that they will get Simeon back.  Joseph sees them when they arrive and brings them to his house and inexplicably treats Benjamin especially well.  He returns Simeon to them  Again, he sends them on their way with full bags and their money unknowingly returned to them.  But, Joseph also did something very sneaky.  He had his steward put Joseph’s fancy silver cup into Benjamin’s bag seeding an elaborate scheme to get his brothers to bring Jacob back as well.  When they were a short distance from the city Joseph sent his steward after them to accuse them of stealing the cup.  It is discovered Benjamin had it and they are brought back to Joseph fearing that he will kill Jacob’s beloved Benjamin.  It winds up that Judah, the brother who orchestrated selling Joseph to the Ishmaelite slave traders for ill-gotten gain, begs Joseph for Benjamin’s life saying he is the last of two brothers who were his father’s favourite sons and their father would die if he didn’t come back.  “Take me as your slave, but let Benjamin go,” he says.

Joseph loses control of himself and begins to weep loudly.  Joseph, the man who has control of all things Egypt can’t stop crying.  All the pent up emotion, all the hurt he had from his brother’s betrayal took him over and he could not stop it from overflowing.  Many a person would have flown off in a fit of blind rage, but Joseph, well, the LORD had been at work in him and through him these last fifteen years and he saw things differently.  He could see a God-reason for what his brothers did to him.  Joseph said it best at the formal forgiveness that he extended to his brothers in chapter 50 when they came to him after the death of Jacob in fear that he still begrudged them.  They lied to him saying it was their father’s request that Joseph forgive them for the crime they committed against him.  Joseph said to them.  “Do not be afraid!  Am I in the place of God?  Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today” (50:19-20).

The evil they did him, God let it happen so that he could work good from it, a good that will affect the whole of God’s people.  This sounds a lot like Romans 8:28 which reads: “We know that in all things God works for good for those who love God, and who are called according to his purpose”.  Through all the undeserved and unjust terrible stuff that happened to Joseph – the betrayal, the slavery, the imprisonment – the LORD was with Joseph and blessed him and prospered everything he did.  God worked good from all the evil done to Joseph as if it fit into something God had planned all along.

I have to admit that this sounds troubling to me.  If you start to think about it, it starts to seem that God orchestrates evil and causes people to suffer just so he can work some good from it and it somehow makes it all okay because God is with that person through it all.  If we don’t want to ponder the idea of God doing evil to bring forth good, then at least we have to take a gander at what kind of God lets terrible things happen to people.  Why does God let bad things happen in the first place?  Why doesn’t he just make it so people don’t do evil?  Why does God stand back and watch why holocausts, atomic bombs, nuclear plant meltdowns, and pandemics happen?  Why does God let an economic system persist that’s based on greed and bullying in which a wealthy few are making a mockery of democracy and causing needless poverty.  Why does God just stand back while we grand-scale destroy the planet God gave us to live on?  Why does a loving God let a messed up world go on instead of acting and fix it? 

Those are real hard questions and indeed the questions that Modern Atheism is built on.  My answer isn’t one that anyone will like, but in short, it is that this is simply the God we’ve got to wrestle with.  We don’t find those questions answered in the Bible other than the day will come when God makes all things new.  But until then, we will find ourselves at times awed in the goodness of God’s presence with us and his blessing on our lives.  But you know we will also spend as much if not more time shaking our fists at heaven screaming “Why God?” or “Wake up, God!” or “Have you forgotten me, God?” or “I’ve been the faithful one this time around, God.  That’s what you promised to be.  Let’s see a little bit of those mighty acts like you did long ago?”  Read the Psalms.  There are more Psalms of Lament in the Book of Psalms than there are Psalms of Praise.  A full one third of the Book are Psalms of Lament.  The psalmists lament as much as Jesus talked about wealth and its ills.  One third of Jesus’ teachings have to do with wealth.  Maybe wealth causes lament, but I digress.  

The first part of my answer to all those questions is God is God, we are not, so we have to resolve ourselves to letting God be God and wrestle with him.  The second part of my answer is that we don’t give enough thought to our role in God’s good creation as those who bear his image.  Like Joseph, humanity is very precocious, very gifted, and God has great hopes for us working to make his creation beautiful.  Yet, like Joseph’s brothers we are selfish and petty and bear the brunt of the responsibility for the way things are.  Moreover, and I apologize to the atheists in the crowd, though I get where you’re coming from; it‘s just infantile for us to say there is no God because there’s evil and God’s not fixing it especially when we are responsible for the most of that evil.  We need to step up and use our giftedness to work for reconciliation and the healing of the messes we have made and stop wishing for miracles.  God gives us guidance but we don’t listen.  God gives us opportunities for reconciliation and healing that we don’t take because like Joseph’s brothers we don’t see the profit in it for ourselves.  As every big pharmaceutical company knows there is more money to be made in maintaining sickness than in curing disease.  So, it seems humanity only sees profit in furthering the persistence of evil until the mess gets so big that only God can clean it up.

Finally, let’s look at Joseph.  Yes, his brothers unjustly betrayed him and sold him into slavery.  Yet, the Lord was with him in slavery and blessed him and caused him to prosper.  Yes, again Joseph was treated unfairly and imprisoned for doing the right and faithful thing when he refused the advances of Potiphar’s wife.  Yet, the Lord was with Joseph in prison and prospered him there.  God makes up for the wrongs committed by his presence and favour.

 Yet, something interesting happens in Joseph’s story as soon as he starts working for Pharaoh.  The narrator of the story in the Bible does not tell us that the LORD was with him, blessing him, and prospering him while he worked for Pharaoh.  It’s suddenly become just Joseph doing what he’s good at.  

As the second most powerful person in Egypt Joseph fully invested himself in serving Pharaoh no questions asked.  Yes, Joseph and Pharaoh both give God the credit for giving Joseph the ability to interpret dreams and the wisdom of how to deal with the coming drought.  But, what did they do with it?  Joseph and Pharaoh took God’s gifts and guidance and used it for ill-gotten gain.  When the drought came and with it famine, instead of simply giving back to the Egyptian people what they worked so hard to produce in the first place during the bumper years, Joseph sold the grain to the Egyptian people, first for all their money and then for all their livestock.  And then having nothing more to buy grain with, Joseph made them sell themselves to Pharaoh to be his slaves.  In the end there was nothing in Egypt that Pharaoh did not own.  Joseph, in the name of Pharaoh, used his God-given giftedness and God’s guidance not to save and bless Egypt, but to enslave it.

All the while, as a huge part of Joseph’s story in the Bible we find God giving Joseph and his brothers the opportunity to reconcile and heal their family.  They do.  God indeed put Joseph in Egypt to provide a way for his own people, Israel, to survive throughout the drought and famine.  In the end, Jacob and his family went to Egypt where Joseph freely provided for them.  They settled in the good land of Goshen and they didn’t have to sell their livestock or themselves to Pharaoh as slaves to buy grain. God providentially took care of his people through Joseph.  Joseph’s dreams and God’s plan came to fruition.

But why did Joseph have to enslave the people of Egypt? Joseph should not have sold to the Egyptians for Pharaoh’s ill-gotten gain that which God had freely provided for them for their security.  He should have freely shared it with them so that God’s peace could rest on the Egyptian people as well.  Joseph chose power, wealth, and prestige over seeking justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with his God and it resulted in the cruel institution of slavery in Egypt that came back to haunt the Israelite people as soon as the day came that there was a Pharaoh who no longer remembered Joseph.  That’s next week’s sermon.  

The same temptation besets each of us every day.  We can take the giftedness God has endowed each of us with and his guidance and instead of seeking justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with our God and neighbour we choose to enlist it to the service of power, wealth, and prestige only to find we simply further human disfunctioning in God’s good creation.  We have a choice to do the good.  Shall we?  Amen.

 

 

Family Matters

Genesis 37:1-28

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The man who was my surrogate father here in Canada had a saying that for when people do things that just run against the grain of anything resembling common sense.  He would say, “There’s nothing stranger than people.”  When we, “people”, display our tendency to show our backsides as our best sides, things can certainly become bizarre.  He would say that and often I would tack on “…except for maybe family.”  Over the years, I’ve just seen more than a fair share of dysfunctional families and have concluded that quite often the reason that people can be “people” is the coop from which they flew, their family.  

The family we grew up in shapes who we are in so many ways.  There’s the simple biology of it.  We inherit personality traits.  Families will also pass behavioural and relational patterns from one generation to another.  It’s in the family unit that we generally form our ideas and instincts of what’s “normal”.  

When it comes to our own personal identities, the core components of what I call ‘me” are shaped by significant events in our families and how our families dealt with them.  More often than not, those significant events weren’t the times when our families were behaving the way families ought to, but rather when our families were behaving the way a family ought not behave.  I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to say that “there’s nothing stranger than people” because people have been hurt by their families, by the very people whom they should have been able to trust.  The breach of the core bond of family affects us profoundly.

Take the family of the patriarch Jacob for example.  We have to ask here, “What would make a group of brothers want to conspire to kill one of their brothers but after talking themselves down from that, sell him to slave traders?”  This vignette of a broken family being in the Bible may shock us particularly if we believe that biblical families should be ideal families.  But, guess what?  You won’t find Ward, June, Wally, and the Beaver in the Bible nor the Walton’s nor the Brady’s. The overwhelming majority of the families in the Bible show us honest to goodness broken families at work…and…God working through them.  

In this case, Jacob’s family is a complicated blended family built on polygamy.  Jacob had two wives and two concubines by whom he sired twelve sons and one daughter.  His wives, Leah and Rachel, were sisters who were constant rivals for his affection.  Of the four women, he loved the younger sister, Rachel, the most.  His two sons by her, Joseph and Benjamin, were his favourites; especially Joseph.  Jacob displayed his favouritism by giving Joseph a very nice multi-coloured robe; techni-coloured as the story goes on Broadway.   His favouritism set in place the terrible family dynamic of the ten other sons having to do the work of shepherding Jacob’s flocks while Joseph did little else to nothing besides be a precocious dreamer and…spy on his brothers for their father for they were known in the area as trouble makers.  Thusly and so, his brothers despised him.

Things between Joseph and his brothers really got tense after two dreams that Joseph had that he was quick to smugly recount to his family.  He was excited by the dreams and believed that by them God was telling him he was destined for greatness.  In the first dream, he and his brothers were binding wheat sheaves.  The sheaf he was working on arose upright while the sheaves of his brothers bowed to it.  His brothers reacted by hating him more.  In the second dream, the sun, moon, and eleven stars bowed down to him.  This one caught Jacob’s eye. Jacob asked, “Shall your mother and I and your brothers come to bow down to the earth before you?” Jacob suspected that the God of his fathers, Isaac and Abraham, had destined Joseph to greatness.  This dream reinforced that.  But his brothers, they were now moved to a jealous hatred of Joseph.  As you likely suspect, this does not bode well; parents playing favourites with their children makes sibling rivalry all the more caustic.

The day soon came, the fateful day that changed everything.  Joseph’s brothers were pasturing the flock in a place called Shechem and this was a concern to Jacob.  The brothers had had trouble with the Shechemites before.  A son of the first family of Shechem had raped their sister Dinah.  The father of the young man tried to make peace and agreed to have all the men of the village circumcised so that they could intermarry.  Unbeknownst to Jacob, as the Shechemite men lay around sore, two of Dinah’s full brothers, Simeon and Levi, killed the young man while the rest of the brothers pillaged the village.  Having that history, Jacob figured he should make sure that his sons were not causing further trouble with the Shechemites, so he sent Joseph to go see what they were up to - that old “go spy on your brothers and come back and tattle” thing. 

Joseph responds to Jacob’s assignment in the words that a prophet would respond to a call from God.  He says, “Here I am.”  A seasoned reader of the Old Testament knows that when someone says “Here I am” in a Bible story, God is about to make something significant happen.  And just a heads up, there are some words and phrases in the next few verses we need to pay attention to because they mean more than their face value.

Joseph set out and reached the area of Shechem, but he doesn’t find his brothers.  He doesn’t find what he’s looking for and therefore can’t carryout his father’s wishes.  Joseph can’t find his brothers and we have to assume that he knows it would be big trouble if the story he takes back to his father is that they aren’t where they are supposed to be.  He had gotten them in trouble before and they got bitter.  Dare he do it again?  

So, he starts to ponder and to wander aimlessly, purposelessly.  Wander is an important word in the Bible usually used when someone is wandering away from God, but here its reflective of the aimless wandering that comes about when our own dreams of purpose have fallen through.  Joseph is wandering about searching for some sign of where his brothers might be and all the while mulling over his options.  I suspect that he’s probably lost in thought as to the meaning of the dreams he had about his family bowing down to him and how that’s now going to happen if his brothers have vamoosed.  Please take a moment and visualize this.  Here’s a young adult of 17 wandering around on the hillsides of Shechem, looking lost, and decked out in a multi-coloured robe.  That sounds like me back in 1983 in my new wave/punk rock phase.

 But anyway, along comes “some man”.  Whenever “some man” shows up in a Bible story, he’s usually a Godsend, someone God is using to get you going in the right direction.  In my life, in my late teens, it was my Dad who got me heading towards the ministry when I was lost and looking for direction.

True to the task of what “some man” is supposed to do in a Bible story, the man asks Joseph “What are you seeking?”  The word “seeking” is significant.  It is almost always used to mean seeking God.  “Seek the Lord while he may be found.”  It isn’t just that Joseph is earnestly seeking his brothers.  He is seeking what the God who gave him those dreams has for him and his brothers are an important part of that.  If his brothers have disappeared on a permanent basis, those dreams might not play out.  So often, our calling from God has to get sorted out in the context of our family relationships.  

Well, the man tells him he heard his brothers say they were going to the area of Dothan.  This is interesting because Dothan is on the main north/south highway for international trade.  We may want to think here that the reason they left Shechem was that they were taking the flocks and running away because they had no intention of bowing down to Joseph.  You see, they too know those dreams were a revelation from God concerning his purpose for Joseph, and they want nothing of it.  

Joseph heads to Dothan and they see him in his multi-coloured robe coming from a distance.  “From a distance” is a metaphorically loaded phrase when describing family relationships.  Too often in our families, we just don’t know each other and only see each other “from a distance”.  We have our opinions about our family members, but our opinions of our family members aren’t who they really are.  The tendency is that we tend to hide ourselves from those closest to us.  Too often the depth of our knowledge of who the people in our families is just our predictions of how they will behave rather than on actually having sat down and listened to who they believe themselves to be.  

In my family, my brother was the oldest of my siblings and I was the youngest.  I had opinions about my brother and could make predictions about how he would behave in everyday situations that were based on his forcing me to wait on him hand and foot and getting pummelled the one time I refused to get him that bowl of Capt. Crunch.  But that was seeing him from a distance.  We were brothers but we never drew close enough to have deep, personal conversations about our lives.  Those conversations came after we left home.

Joseph drew close to them.  That’s also metaphorical.  They caught a glimpse of who their brother Joseph was and the purpose God had for him because of the dreams.  Sadly, they wanted nothing to do with it because of their opinions, their distant knowledge of Joseph.  The dreams only fed into their negative opinions of him formed by their father playing favourites.

Only able to have the distant opinions of Joseph now complicated by those dreams, they conspire to kill him.  We must see the contrast here between what Joseph is up to in that moment and what they are up to.  Joseph was seeking his brothers because he realized they played a role in what God had planned for him.  But, the brothers were conspiring to kill him for what God was up to in Joseph.  They took to heart their opinions about Joseph rather than saw him for who he was – a precocious, and very gifted young man whom their God had big plans for.  They just saw a dreamer and a smug little snot who always got their father’s affections before them, the ones who did all the work.  They just wanted to be done with him and here was an opportunity that they just couldn’t let pass them by.  Joseph was alone and vulnerable and they were far from home.  Fortunately, instead of killing him they sold him to slave traders.

Family dynamics are too often a tough row to hoe.  Family can be supportive and nurturing but also just as much hurtful, harmful, and debilitating when family members start acting like “people”.  These dysfunctional dynamics become even more complicated when God’s plans for our lives enter the picture.  

Looking back on my own life to when I was Joseph’s age, it was one thing for me to start going to church by my own decision and totally another when I started talking in terms of sensing God wanted my to go into the ministry.  Like Jacob my father had a sense that God was calling me, but the rest of my family could only see me from a distance and were quite concerned.  They knew me as being shy and having difficulty speaking my mind.  They knew the politics of ministry might eat me up and were rightfully concerned; concern, which to me in my opinions from a distance about them, felt like discouragement to do what I felt called to do.  Surprisingly, part of the preparation for ministry that God put me through was the task of having those difficult but healing conversations with family members that served to draw us closer.  Like Joseph seeking his brothers, my seeking to know my parents and my siblings for who they were as persons was a crucial part of what it was for me to seek God and know God’s unconditional love, grace, and forgiveness, and to know the freedom of letting go of hurt and grudges so that I might grow into who God wanted me to be.

Jacob’s family and the story of Joseph teaches us a valuable lesson or two or three.  First, God in love and grace still works in and through family dysfunction.  We don’t have to come from the Cleaver family or the Walton family or the Brady Bunch for God to work in and through us.  

Second, family ties are such that we are so close that we can’t really see each other for who we are.  No one knows us better than our family, but too often what we know of each other is little more than distant opinions.  We have to do the hard work of communicating and sharing ourselves in the midst of our families.  

Lastly, the family can no doubt be a relational dynamic that kills our spirits.  Our “from a distance” opinions about our family members truly can lead us to conspire against and hurt family members. Therefore, we should take the difficult road of opening our eyes to and for the members of our families to look for what God is doing in the lives of each them.  It is in supporting God’s work in our families to make us each the person God wants us to be that our families find wholeness and health.  Amen.