SUNDAY SERMON ― COMMUNITY OF HOPE, Pastor Tisha Brown
God’s Action in the World
Genesis 45:1-15
August 17, 2008
This morning’s reading from Genesis is a story of messy humanity, of sibling rivalry, jealousy among wives and children, of evil intentions, of pride and arrogance, of poverty and wealth, it’s a story about us.
Joseph is the favored son – the oldest son of Jacob’s favorite wife, Rachel. (had to marry Leah in order to get Rachel) He gets a special coat from his father, he tattles on his brothers, he has dreams in which the brothers and his father and mother bow down to him, pay homage to him. His brothers decide they have to get rid of him. At first they want to kill him but then they decide to just throw him in a pit. Then they decide they want to sell him but when they return to the pit, he’s already been sold to some Ishmaelites who were heading to Egypt. The Ishmaelites sell him to the Pharoah. Over the years, Joseph rises to power in Egypt in part because of his ability to interpret Pharoah’s dreams, which helps Egypt prepare for 7 years of abundance followed by 7 years of famine.
During the time of the famine, Joseph’s family hears that Egypt has food and Jacob sends some of his sons to buy food. Joseph recognizes them but they don’t recognize him; he sells them food but tricks them saying they have to leave one of their brothers in Egypt and bring their youngest brother back. The return a second time, he tricks them again by placing valuable items in their sacks of food and then sending people after them to accuse them of stealing. Finally, when they’ve returned to Joseph’s house to defend themselves from the accusation of stealing, Joseph reveals himself to them, which is where we pick up the story.
Read Scripture
A central theme of scripture and of our lives of faith is humanity’s effort to understand God’s presence and action in creation and within the human community. The purpose of the stories found in Genesis is to explain Israel’s origins as a people and a nation and to affirm her election as God’s chosen people. Through these stories Israel is trying to understand itself and its relationship with God through time.
This is what we human beings do – we create and tell stories about ourselves, about God and about our relationship with God. We use our senses, our intellect, and our experiences to weave stories about our lives that explain why we are where we are. Our stories help us find meaning in our experiences and in our daily lives. They give us hope for the future, and help us see or interpret God’s presence and action in the world.
One of my favorite stories about God’s presence and action in my life and in the life of this congregation is the story of how I came to be your pastor…
My Dad was a member of this church from roughly 1987-1990. My sister Heather was confirmed in this church and my sister Lara reluctantly attended, probably in her pajamas. During this time, I was a student at UW-Madison. When I was home on weekends, I would come to church here. For the two summers during this time period I went on the summer canoe trips.
It was either 1999 or early 2000 that I next worshipped here. I was in my second year of seminary and had come to Madison for a short vacation. Since I was in town, I decided to come here for Sunday morning worship. It happened to be Ute’s first Sunday as pastor. During the prayer time, I prayed to myself; “Dear God, this is a really cool church and I like it a lot. I know I’m still in seminary and this woman who is their new pastor will probably be here for a long time but if it’s ever possible, I would love to be the pastor of this congregation.”
Fast forward to 2003 – I’ve graduated from seminary and am living in Waukesha and serving as the Associate Pastor of Brookfield Congregational Church. Cindy and I’ve been dating for 2 years and have decided that to take our relationship to another level I need to move to Madison. I tell my friend Deborah, who was the Associate Pastor at Orchard Ridge about this decision. A few weeks later she calls to tell me that Ute has just announced she’s leaving Community of Hope to take a call on the East Coast. Immediately, I contact Bob Mutton, the Association Minister and ask him to submit my profile to Hope’s search committee. He gives them my profile and encourages them to take a look at it. The search committee agrees to consider me and you know how the story ends.
I give God a lot of credit for how this story unfolded and for how it continues to unfold. I believe God used the action of my family, me, Ute, the search committee and all the members of this congregation to bring us together as pastor and congregation. God worked within all of us to help us understand that this would be a good match and God continues to work within all of us to guide and shape our relationship as pastor and congregation.
When the Israelites were in exile in Babylon, they did just what I did. They looked retrospectively at their history as a people to try to understand and make sense of how they had gotten to where they were.
When Joshua’s story was recorded, the Israelites were in exile in Babylon and wondering – how did the chosen people end up being exiled from the promised land? Are we still God’s chosen people? Has God abandoned us because of our unfaithfulness?
To answer these questions they had to first prove to themselves that they were God’s chosen people, that God hadn’t completely abandoned them. And so they told the stories of their origins as a nation – from the creation of the universe all the way to how they got to Egypt. And since they were at the center of their own concerns about their present and their future, the stories they told featured them and their ancestors as the primary actors and sought to envision and comprehend God’s action in their midst.
Joshua’s story is one of triumph and of life being preserved. It showed the Israelites that God had chosen them for a special purpose and acted in their history to preserve their life as a nation. God used Joseph, his entire family, including the evil intentions of his brothers, the Pharoah and Egypt to preserve the original remnant of God’s chosen people – Joseph and his 11 brothers, the 12 tribes of Israel. In this messy story of human jealousy, fear, anger, pride, frustration, and hope God is present and active working all things to the good to preserve the life, wholeness, health and vitality of God’s people.
Well, that’s all fine and good, Tisha but do you believe God made Joseph’s brothers plot to kill him so that Joseph could end up in Egypt so that he could save his family from famine? Do you believe God made your dad come to this church, made Ute, whom we loved, leave so that you could be our pastor? Is this what you believe about how God works in the world – as a manipulator of events to suit God’s purposes?
To those questions, I would have to say no, I don’t believe that is how it happens. What I do believe is that God takes the things that happen in the world and uses them to move toward life and wholeness for the creation as a whole. Even the hurtful, difficult, badly intentioned actions of humanity can be used by God to preserve life, to create greater wholeness and justice for all of creation.
One of the greatest gifts we were given at the time of creation was the ability to act on our own free will. We are not marionettes in God’s cosmic play. We are not manipulated through time by God’s great plan for the world blindly following the predetermined path God has already laid down for us.
We are independent actors with God in the drama of faith and life and in the unfolding process of the universe. God uses everything we do and are, everything we experience and know, every element of the universe to move creation toward wholeness. We are free to participate in this work of creation or not, we are free to choose life and wholeness ourselves or not. But regardless of our choices, God continues to move toward wholeness because God is a strong, consistent, steadfast presence of love and life in its fullest sense in our lives and in the world who can take even our most heinous acts and somehow make a way for healing and new life to emerge.
I also imagine some of you might also be thinking o.k. I can buy this idea some of the time. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on your story about becoming the pastor here – that turned out in your favor and I’ll give you the story of Joseph and his family, that also turned out well in the end. But what about the times in life when everything falls apart? What about hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters? What about jobs lost? What about early or tragic death? What about suffering? What about abuse? What about all the times when prayer doesn’t see to work? Where is God then? Where was God when I needed healing or hope or new life and it just didn’t happen?
These questions are a little tougher to deal with because there is such a strong history in Christianity of blaming the bad stuff that happens on individuals and whole groups of people because of their shortcomings and for the ways in which they don’t fit the accepted mold of human behavior. Looking through this lens of the God – human – world relationship means believing that God punishes humanity for its shortcomings, failings and sin by causing bad stuff to happen so that we repent and seek forgiveness. Bad stuff happens to us because God is angry at us or because our faith wasn’t strong enough or because we broke the cosmic moral code and attracted God’s wrath on ourselves or our nation. This view is prevalent throughout scripture and is a very difficult tradition of interpretation for us to deal with today.
But to this interpretation of God’s action in our lives and in the world, I say that Christian history and Christian interpretation and understanding of God has been shortsighted, ignorant and in some cases just plain wrong. I do not believe God causes bad things to happen any more than I believe God causes good things to happen. God uses the good and the bad, the painful and the joyful, the successes and the failures of life to consistently and steadfastly move toward life, healing, wholeness, and justice. I do not believe God punishes us for our lack of faith or our shortcomings any more than I believe God rewards us when our faith is strong or when we act out of our strengths. It is even possible that God doesn’t perceive good and bad in the same way we humans do. Maybe to God it’s all just stuff – raw material for God’s saving purpose and for the ways in which God is always moving the universe and us toward God’s glorious vision of how creation could be and should be. I believe God uses our strengths and our weaknesses, our successes and our failures, beautiful sunny days and horribly stormy days, death and birth, sickness and health to move toward preserving life, healing, wholeness and justice. But How?
Let me tell you another story… Over the past 6 weeks or so I’ve been dealing with an interpersonal conflict. (Let me assure you, this isn’t about Cindy and me.) It’s an unfortunate situation in which I’ve recently been made aware of disappointments and hurts I caused or at least participated in that have been harbored for a few years. When the conflict finally erupted the hurts and disappointments went so deep that the only resolution seemed to be terminating the relationship.
This has been an incredibly painful emotional time. No one likes to see how their actions or inactions caused harm to another human being or to look at the pain in another person’s eyes and hear that person’s story of how that pain was partially caused by you. These are not pleasant experiences and it was really difficult at first to see how God could possibly be working within them.
But now that some of the intense, initial pain has eased somewhat I have been able to think about my own behavior both over the past few years and also within the difficult conversations of the past few weeks and see where I have some growing to do.
Reconciliation may or may not be possible in this case, but I can learn from this experience so that I am less likely to find myself in this same situation again in the future. I can learn from my observations of myself and from what I was told by the other party to grow as a human being, to be more careful, more compassionate, clearer about my own boundaries, more straightforward about what I’m willing to do and not do within any given relationship etc. In this way, I am beginning to see God acting through the pain and loss of this difficult circumstance. I see God holding me and the other party with concern, love and care for us. I envision God working in my life and in the life of the other party to offer healing over time so there might be a chance for reconciliation in the future. I see God gently guiding me in my self-reflection to use this experience of conflict to learn and grow as a person and as a Christian, to more fully embrace honesty, trust, courage and love in all my relationships.
I believe God is present in every situation and circumstance of our lives. God’s presence is consistently and unwaveringly a loving presence, a presence aimed at preserving life – and by life I don’t necessarily mean our physical, bodily life, but the fullness of life which includes our bodily death but affirms the ongoing life of our spirits and of our love. This loving presence is limited in some ways by the reality of the broken world in which we live and often God’s dream for our lives and our world is frustrated and interrupted and even still, God is there, loving, life-giving, wholeness seeking, justice creating for all of creation.
My hope and my prayer for us and for our world is that we might move more and more toward this idea of the relationship between God and the world – a way of seeing God’s presence in the world that affirms life and love for all, all the time. I pray that we are able to learn and grow through the challenges of life, to not assume they are some kind of punishment but to receive them as opportunities to increase our capacity for love and compassion for ourselves, our world and one another. And my deepest prayer is that we continue always to grow in our ability and willingness to trust that God is a constant and abiding source of love, healing and wholeness even when it seems our world is falling apart. May it be so for you and for me and for our world. Amen.