Weaving Good

Genesis 37:3-8, 17-22, 26-34 and 50:15-21

“Weaving Good ”

25 September 2016 St. Andrew’s Military Chapel Singapore

            Little brothers are so annoying at times. They get all the special treatment and attention, relaxed curfew rules, and if there is ever an argument or fight the younger brother always comes out smelling like roses because he would never start an argument.

            Well, that’s at least what us older brothers would like everyone to believe. Disclaimer: my brother and I had our moments, but we get along just fine and I hold no ill will against the favoritism he received J

            Joseph does nothing to dispel these stereotypes. The Joseph we meet in in Genesis 37 is a certified brat. He tells his brothers on multiple occasions they will all bow down to him because he is the greatest of the bunch. His father keeps him home while the rest toil in the fields and even gives Joseph a special cloak, the famous Technicolor Dreamcoat.

            I don’t blame his brothers for holding a bit of a grudge and wanting to teach Joseph some humility. But, they went a bit far in their endeavor to bring their annoying little brother down a notch or two.

            I may have threatened my own brother with shipping him off myself, but it was nothing more than threats. I’m pretty sure I also frequently tried to convince him he was adopted, because who would let this annoyance into our family? We may have also had a few fights where some good-natured roughhousing got a bit out of control or what seemed like a good defense of personal space or property was taken too far. But, I never actually thought of throwing him in a ditch or selling him to someone (maybe I did think of selling him off).

            Good thing Ruben spoke some sense into the family mob and told them to not kill Joseph and just leave him in a pit for a while so he could go and clean up the mess later. However, his brothers were a step ahead of him and went back to the pit to sell him off, but some other wanderers had already found Joseph and sold him where he eventually lands in Egypt.

            Joseph’s story includes a bit more suffering. He becomes a member of Potiphar’s household, does quite well in his role actually. For someone who really hadn’t worked a day in his life, he becomes the head of Potiphar’s house running the day-to-day helping Potiphar prosper. Potiphar noticed that Joseph had a special blessing and continued to rely on Joseph.

            Potiphar’s wife becomes jealous and covetous of Joseph, eventually accusing him of sexual assault. Potiphar, without even asking for the whole story, throws Joseph into jail. Again, in the midst of that suffering and tragedy, people are put under Joseph’s care and he takes care of his fellow prisoners. In prison Joseph is correctly interpreting dreams, the same thing that got him into this whole mess. Wword gets back to Pharaoh about Joseph’s dream reading ability.

            Correctly interpreting Pharaoh’s dream about an upcoming famine, Joseph is put in charge of preparing Egypt for the famine. Again Joseph is influencing people outside of Israel. Eventually, his brothers come to Egypt looking for relief from the famine because Egypt is the only nation that properly prepared and has so much grain stored up they can sell to other nations.

            Joseph gets back at his brothers a bit and requires them to bring their youngest brother to Egypt with them. Despite the pleas of Jacob to let Benjamin stay in Israel, the family returns with Benjamin and learns that Joseph never died but that his being sold into slavery worked out for the good of Joseph, his family, and the nation of Israel.

            Nice, neat, and tidy. Just the way we like our fairy tales to end. However, this isn’t a fairy tale, it’s a story of how Israel is able to survive almost any circumstance because God is at work in every situation.

            Just looking at the news every day, we know that happy endings for those in slavery are not the norm. There are many happy endings, but there are many more that don’t end this way. So, it may be hard to see God at work in the darkness of the world. How do we make sense of this happy ending when we know what happens in the world around us?

            There are many ways to translate the Hebrew word that gives us the word intend in verse 50. One way to read this verse is “Even though you planned to harm me, God considered/wove it for good.”

            If we read it this way it changes our interpretation from where God is the one who lets bad things happen or causes them to occur to a reading where God can work good through what the world intends for ill. God has the ability to take horrible things and weave them into something beautiful through the redemptive power of God’s grace.

Will this always occur? No. But, the possibility of that redemption, even if the metamorphosis occurs without our knowledge is what nourishes a hopeful life.

            A situation that looked close to unredeemable at the time became something unexpected. I can find that transformation not just in Joseph, but throughout the story of Israel. But that’s not just Israel’s story, it is our story. 

            The wandering Abraham finds a lasting home, the murderer Cain is protected by God, barren women like Sarah and Rebecca have children, Hagar and Ishmael get a nation, the devious Jacob is renamed Israel, and even arrogant Joseph is humble and forgiving of those that made him suffer immensely. John Newton goes from slave trader to writer of Amazing Grace. Horatio Spafford pens It is Well With My Soul while sailing over the route where his family perished in a sinking.

Christians are a weird family, completely different in almost every way but united through our faith. We, in the line of Israel, are a family full of deception, jealousy, hatred, gossip, wishing of ill will, ignorance of social ills, the list goes on. However, our family is resilient, ultimately reliable, and most important, redeemable. For we are all redeemable regardless of what we have and haven’t done.

            What we intend for harm and ill will is not beyond the reach of God’s grace and redemption. No matter the evil in one’s heart, it cannot overpower the love and grace of God. I may never see the battle won on a grand scale where all pain is washed away, but I can see the small victories of grace over despair each and every day. At times, it may feel like despair is winning the day in my own life, but my faith in God’s grace and love gives hope for the next breath, the next step, the next day. So I too can be like Joseph and open for God to redeem any situation I find myself to reflect God’s glory and power to the world.

Promises Promises

Genesis 15:1-6

“Promises, Promises”

18 September 2016 St. Andrew’s Military Chapel Singapore

            We all like receiving promises and blessings from others. Promises give us hope and something to look forward to as we trudge through the valleys of life. While they may show us that we are small because someone is offering the gift of a promise or blessing to us, at the same time promises and blessings demonstrate to us that we are part of something much greater than ourselves.

            Sometimes promises are small. An ice cream for good grades. The knowledge the tooth fairy will leave a small amount of money in exchange for a tooth. The ability to start in a sporting event for your final home game or match (especially for those of us that struggled to even make the team much less to get playing time). Maybe the promise to play in a big game if the score is way too lopsided (in your team’s favor or against).

            Other times we receive or make large promises. Paying for a child’s education (maybe with some strings attached). Signing a mortgage on a home. Getting married. Having or adopting a child or children.

            Sometimes promises are fulfilled and we are grateful. Sometimes promises are broken and we are disappointed at best and devastated at worst. Accepting the gift of a promise means that we are putting our trust in another person to fulfill that promise. Even if we put it to paper and sign something that is legally binding, there aren’t any guarantees.

            Then, there are promises that are fulfilled, but just not in the way we expect or desire to have a promise fulfilled.

            At this point in Abram’s life, he has been promised a great deal from God in exchange for a few things. Leave his home, drag his immediate family away from the land he knew to a new land without any support in exchange for the hope that he would one day be the start of a new nation in this strange new world he found himself.   

            He’s done all that and yet, at the ripe old age of 75 he is still without an heir. He could legally pass everything along to one of his servants allowing the promise to be fulfilled through his household, but God specifically said it would be fulfilled through his offspring. So Abram does what we all do, he lodges a complaint with God.

            In the Old Testament, blessings follow a fairly predictable pattern. The recipient receives a blessing or promise and will then protest in some manner as to why the blessing won’t work (human circumstances that will preclude its fulfillment, a feeling of inadequacy in the recipient). But, there is always God saying, “Relax, I’ve got this.”

            And that’s the part we tend to miss even today, God’s reassurance.

            It’s easy for us to get so focused on the humanity in which we live that we forget to let God be God in our lives. We all do this, so it’s kind of reassuring that the father of our faith, the soon to be renamed Abraham, has similar doubts within his own faith.

            Remember, in Abram’s case even the reassurance of God talking to him and having him physically look at a representation of the vastness of his influence wasn’t enough to prevent him and Sarai from trying to fulfill God’s promise by their own methods, or even laughing at God years later while still awaiting the glimmer of fulfillment to the promise.

            The promise God made to Abram and Sarai could literally be one regarding their life or death. Back in the day, one depended on children to care for them in their later years. Families expected that the children would take care of their elders as they aged and were unable to tend the flock, sow and harvest the crops, go and draw water from the well. Without children, as one got older they were at the mercy of may factors because Social Security, 401Ks, super annuation, whatever we do for retirement planning, was thousands of years away.

            So, in spite of Sarai being unable to have children, God has promised them a long life with someone to care for them as they grew older and to continue the family in a new land. By providing the promise of children to those without prospects of having a child, God has provided new life and resurrection to this family. But, not in the way or on the timeline they are expecting and that is why it is easy to miss God’s reassurance of “I’ve got this.”

              Along with missing God’s reassurance, sometimes it’s also easy to forget the reason God blesses individuals. God doesn’t bless for an Instagram hashtag or to show off our blessing to the world. Just as when God first blessed Abram saying, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing…and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed,” we too are expected to bless the world.

            That isn’t a condition on the blessing; it’s the result of the blessing. God blessed Abram before he could live into his part. God used Abram, and plans to use everyone else who proclaims a belief in God to bless the world as a result of receiving a divine blessing. I read a great definition of what is meant by being blessed to be a blessing. Walter Brueggemann writes that a blessing is “not a direct responsibility to do something for others but that the life of [the one blessed] under the promise will energize and model a way for the other nations also to receive a blessing from this God.”

            Maybe I’ll never know what my blessing to the world looks like or ever see the blessing played out because I am only planting seeds and my time on earth will end well before those seeds bear fruit. Maybe I have blessed someone or something and didn’t realize it at the time. Either way, it is my faith in God’s steadfast promise that I will bless the world not to receive God’s blessing and love, but as a result of God’s loving me enough to bless me.

            When I experience the normal course of doubting God’s promises and wondering if I am blessed or am a blessing to the world, I can reflect back on Abram and Sarai and draw strength from the fact that they and I are walking the same journey. Moments of absolute knowing, moments of asking if God really does have a plan, moments of laughing in God’s face, moments of awe that God would dare use me as part of the grandest plan of all, and moments of relief that God’s got this.

            More than anything, Abram and Sarai show us that faith is hard. There will be starts and stops with doubt and dark times as part of the journey. Sometimes we’ll laugh in God’s face at the sheer absurdity of the request and/or reward. But, what we do know is that promise will be fulfilled in God’s way on God’s timeline which, at times, will defy all logic and reason. Even more, we may never see the fulfillment of that promise in our lifetimes, but we lean forward, knowing that God is present and active in our lives and the world keeping God’s promises and blessing us to be blessings to the world. God’s got this.