Old Hurts and New Beginnings by Rev. Kathy Sides (Preached at Fort Des Moines UMC )

Transcription

1 Old Hurts and New Beginnings by Rev. Kathy Sides (Preached at Fort Des Moines UMC ) Today's Old Testament lesson is a story of reunion and reconciliation. It's a story of laying aside and forgiving old hurts, and of looking forward to new beginnings. The account of Joseph's reunion with his brothers is a touching one. And, even though we might be tempted to think that it happened so long ago that it couldn t possibly have anything to do with us, we could still learn a thing or two from it. But to really appreciate what is going on in the short passage of scripture we heard today, we need to go back a lot of years, to when the story really began. Or as Paul Harvey would say, we need to know "the rest of the story" So for now let's leave behind the Joseph of today's lesson; a Joseph in his late thirties who has become a very important man in Egypt, and travel back about twenty-two years, to the land of Canaan. There we find a seventeen-yearold boy named Joseph, whose life is is about to change drastically due to the hatred and jealosy of his older brothers. As many of you might remember, Joseph's father Jacob (who is also called Israel), had twelve sons, from four different wives. Joseph and Benjamin were the sons of Jacob's beloved wife Rachel, and Jacob made it no secret that Joseph was his favorite son. Genesis 37, verses 3 and 4, says; "Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he had made him a long robe with sleeves. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably to him." Evidently Joseph didn't help matters any. After going to help his brothers with the sheep, he brought back a bad report of them to their father. Now, I had three older brothers, and so I know from personal experience that telling on your older brothers is not a good way to endear yourself to them. And then to make matters worse, Joseph made a point of telling his brothers about these dreams he had been having. Dreams which seemed to imply that one day his brothers would all bow down to him. This only made a bad situation worse, and their jealousy and hatred towards him grew. Considering the situation, perhaps Jacob should have known better. But while his older sons were pasturing the flock away from home, he sent Joseph out alone to go check on how they were doing and report back to him. And the jealousy and hatred of Joseph's brothers got the best of them. When they saw Joseph coming towards them from a distance, they plotted to kill him. Only through the intervention of his oldest brother was Joseph's life spared. Instead of killing him, they stripped him of his robe and threw him into a nearby pit. 1

2 Now some of us might admit that, at one time or another, we might have briefly toyed with the idea of selling our sibblings. But Joseph's brothers actually did it. When a little while later some traders passed by, they took Joseph out of the pit and sold him to them for twenty pieces of silver. Then they proceeded to kill a goat, dip Joseph's robe in the blood, and take it back to their father. Believing that his best loved son had been devoured by wild animals, Jacob mourned for his son and would not be comforted. Meanwhile, Joseph was taken to Egypt, and sold to Potiphar, one of Pharaoh's officials, the captain of the guard. For awhile things did not go too badly for Joseph. According to the scriptures, the Lord was with Joseph, and caused all he did to prosper. Because of this, Joseph found favor with Potiphar, and was made overseer of all he had. But his good fortune was short lived. When Joseph resisted the repeated advances of Potiphar's wife, she falsely accused him of trying to rape her, and Joseph found himself in prison, where he spent several years. But even in prison "the LORD was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love." Joseph found favor with the chief jailor and was put in charge of the other prisoners. Joseph successfully interpreted the dreams of two of Pharaoh's officers while in prison, and so he eventually found himself summoned to interpret some troubling dreams of Pharaoh himself. Through his interpretation of the dreams, Joseph predicted that Egypt would experience seven years of plenty, followed by seven years of famine. He advised Pharaoh to appoint overseers to gather a portion of the plenty, and store it to be used during the famine. Pharaoh was impressed with Joseph, and believed that the spirit of God was with him, so he put him in charge of his house, his people, and all of Egypt. Quite a change in fortune! Just as Joseph had predicted, after seven years of plenty came the famine. But because of Joseph s preparation during the good years, Egypt had grain while other places did not. So people from all over came to Joseph to buy grain. And among those who appeared before Joseph were his ten older brothers. The same brothers who years ago had sold their young brother into slavery. They stood before this important official in Egypt, never dreaming that this man was that younger brother they had treated so cruely. This was Joseph's perfect chance to get even. His brothers were at his mercy. He had to power to do whatever he chose to these men before him. If we think about what we would do in Joseph's place, we might find ourselves in a moral debate with ourselves. We may know, and we may tell ourselves, that to forgive would be the right and godly thing to do. 2

3 But, being human, it is all to easy to think how satisfying revenge would be. After all, it is a terrible and hateful thing to sell your brother into an unknown fate, and to leave your father in grief all those years, believing that the son he had loved so was dead. It is tempting to want to see them pay for what they have done. And so we may find ourselves torn between forgiveness and revenge. And perhaps that is where Joseph found himself, because he does not immediately forgive. Instead he makes his brothers squirm a bit. I invite you to go back and read the account in Genesis to get all the details, but suffice it to say that Joseph messes with his brothers for awhile. And we are not told whether Joseph finally decides his brothers have learned their lesson, or if he has a change of heart that leads him to forgive his brothers. But for whatever reason, there comes a turning point in the story. Joseph begins to weep, and he reveals his identity to his brothers, with the following words; "I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years; and there are five more years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest. God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he has make me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. Hurry and go up to my father and say to him, 'Thus says your son Joseph, God has made me lord of all Egypt; come down to me, do not delay. You shall settle in the land of Goshen, and you shall be near me, you and your children and your children's children, as well as your flocks, your herds, and all that you have. I will provide for you there..." (Genesis 45:4b-11a) With this speech Joseph does three very important things. First, he forgives his brothers. Second, he acknowledges the hand of God in the events of his life. Third, he looks toward the future with his family. What Joseph suffered at the hands of his brothers was a hateful thing. He had lived with the hurt of it for over twenty years. No doubt there had been many times throughout those years when he had relived in his mind the experience of being sold into slavery by his own brothers. Times when he had imagined the grief of his father when he had not returned home. And surely there were times when he imagined a moment such as this, when he was face to face with those who had wronged him, with the power to make them pay for what they had done. 3

4 Yet faced with the opportunity, Joseph does the unexpected. He forgives. I think he is able to do so because, perhaps for the first time, looking back on the events of his life he is able to see how God has worked through those events to bring about good. He is able to see the good that has come from his being sent to Egypt, and to believe that God was at work in his life, bringing good out of evil. It seems that with forgiveness comes the gift of letting go of the past and looking toward the future. Joseph asks his brothers to return to their father with the news that he is alive, and to bring his father and all of the rest of their family to be near him. He is able to look toward a future of being reunited with his family, including the brothers who had treated him so hatefully in the past. What about us? Can we learn something from this story? Few of us have suffered from injustice and hatred to the extent that Joseph did. But I do think we all have something in common with Joseph, because we have all, at some time or another in our lives, been hurt. It does not matter if our hurts are less dramatic than Joseph's, in their own way they are no less painful. Ours may be the hurt of broken relationships, the hurt of people who expect too much or too little of us, or the hurt of personal failures and of dreams unfulfilled. All who live and love will at some time in their life experience hurt. It is a given. Along with the joy and wonder of living and loving, there is pain. We may not be able to avoid being hurt, but we can choose how we deal with the hurts and disappointments we have suffered. We can choose to dwell on the hurts of the past, and let them rob us of the joy of the present and the possibilities of the future, or we can, like Joseph, forgive them, and with the grace of God, move past them. We can forgive others for hurting us, or letting us down, or for choosing to live their lives without us; and we can forgive ourselves for not always being everything we thought we would be. Forgiveness is not always an easy thing. In fact, I would say that forgiveness is seldom an easy thing. Just as it did not come instantly for Joseph, it may not come instantly for us. But I believe that with God, it is possible. I know that sometimes in the midst of things it is difficult to see God at work in the events of our lives. When we are hurting we sometimes are not able to believe that God can bring anything good out of our pain. At times it is only much later that we are able to look back and acknowledge that God was indeed present in our lives. Like Joseph, it may only be after forgiving the past and choosing to look toward the future that we can recognize how God has been active in our lives all along. The good news is that each day that God gives us, is a day for new beginnings; a day when we have the opportunity to forgive and lay aside the hurts of the past and believe that God can bring out of the past, a better future. 4

5 Like many of you, I have discovered that each time I revisit a well-known story in the Bible, I can find something new in it that I may not have thought about before. In thinking about this story of Joseph this week, a couple of new thoughts occurred to me. One is, that sometimes, such as in Joseph s case, we carry old hurts caused by the intentional actions of others. But other times, and maybe more often, the hurt we carry over the past can t be traced to a single life-changing incident. Instead it is a kind of cumulative grief; a collection of hurts caused by all of the losses, changes, disappointments and griefs that we have experienced. There might not be anyone we can identify that we need to forgive to be able to move forward; unless it is God for not creating a perfect world, or life, for not turning out exactly as we had hoped it would. And yet there is a sense that we need to let go of the old hurts before we can embrace the new beginnings that God has for us. If we hold too tightly to the past, and the hurt, we kind of get stuck there, unable to move forward and to believe that God holds a future that is full of promise. Sometimes it s not even past hurts that hold us back, it s just plain fear of letting go of the known that has been in favor of the unknown that might be. Joseph was able to see that God had been at work even though painful events he might have wished had been different. No doubt that gave him the faith to believe that God would continue to be at work in the new beginning he and his brothers were making. The other thing that occurred to me as I revisted Joseph s story this week is that it is not only we as indivuduals that can learn something from it. I think it also has something to say to us collectively as a church. We often find ourselves in this church, and in many similar churches with long histories, looking back at the past. Sometimes it is with a sense of sadness at the changes, both in the church and in the world; beloved friends no longer with us, pews no longer full, the church no longer the center of people s lives. It s really hard not to look back and regret what has been lost. And it is OK to do that, to look back, to remember, and even to grieve. But then it is time to do as Joseph did; acknowlege that God has been at work in the past, day after day, year after year. And then have the faith to let go of the past, all the good and bad, and move toward whatever the future holds. To do that with confidence that God will contine to be at work in the future, just as God has always been. The future might look much different than the past; both in each of our own lives, and in our corporate life together as this church. And that can seem scary. But let us hold tight to the knowledge that God is in the midst of it; past, present and future. Today, this day, is an opportunity for a new beginning. Let us see what God might do. 5