H. Stephen Shoemaker
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, North Carolina
September 12, 2004
JOSEPH: PROVIDENCE AND HUMAN ACTION
Texts: Genesis 50:15-21; Romans 8:28
Today our children begin their five-week adventure into the story of Joseph
as they begin their new Rotation Model Curriculum. Let’s join them! At least
for today. In Jewish tradition there are five "scrolls" or five
major stories from the Hebrew Bible which the whole community reads together
every year in their five major festivals. So for today, let’s all join the
children in rolling open this scroll.
I
I title the sermon: God’s Providence and Human Action. God’s
plan and purpose for the world is being worked out every day, sometimes in
cooperation with human action, other times in the face of it. Our partnership
with God is decisively important for our lives and the lives of those around
us, but the salvation of the world, its healing and redemption, is finally not
left to us.
This theme is highlighted near the end of the story where Joseph’s
brothers are cowering in fear before him. They had sold him into slavery when
he was a teenager. Now he is a prince of Egypt and has the power of life and
death over them. He had promised father Jacob that he would not take revenge
on his brothers.
Now his father has died. Will he keep his promise? When his brothers ask
what he will now do with them, Joseph says:
Do not be afraid. Am I in God’s place?
No, you meant it for evil but God meant it for good.
You meant it for evil but God used it for good. I like Rabbi Emmett Fox’s
translation:
You planned ill against me, (but)
God planned-it-over for good.
I like the translation because it conveys a dynamic, interactive,
relational picture of God’s providence.
Some see God’s providence as some fixed plan. "God wills it,"
people say resignedly, or "Allah wills it." God’s will determines
everything; the human role is almost completely passive.
Other people emphasize the human role in the achieving of God’s plan:
"God has no hands but our hands," they say. There is some real truth
here, but it is partial truth.
The Joseph story points to a deeper truth and Joseph "gets it."
His human hand is important, but it is God’s hand that is finally
victorious.
The book of Genesis begins saying that God made us and blessed us and
called us good. God’s plan is life, full flourishing life for all
creation.
Sometimes our human action thwarts God’s purposes and obscures God’s
face, but here is the gospel:
You planned evil
We planned evil
I planned evil
but
God planned-it-over for good.
II
The story begins when Joseph is seventeen. The first-born son of the
beloved Rachel, Joseph was the apple of his father’s eye, Jacob’s
favorite.
It’s painfully ironic: Father Jacob was himself passed over, his own
father Isaac preferring Esau to him. Now he does the same injurious thing and
plays favorites with his son Joseph.
Joseph was the favored son. He knew it, he loved it and he flaunted it. His
father gave him a coat of many colors, and he wore it like a neon sign that
read "Father Loves Me Best."
His brothers hated him, and we can understand. Once he came to them with
his latest dream. "Listen to my dream," he said. "We were
gathering wheat in a field when suddenly my bundle stood up and all yours
formed a circle around mine and bowed down to it."
His brothers didn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to get the point.
"What!" they cried, "You wish to reign over us??"
Undaunted, oblivious, Joseph told them a second dream – this one even
more preposterous: "I saw the sun and the moon and eleven stars prostrate
before me." That was too much, even for his doting father Jacob.
"What?! said Jacob. "Are you like God so that even your parents and
brothers bow down to you?"
Because of his dream his brothers hated him even more. They began a plot to
kill him. One day father Jacob sent Joseph to meet his brothers. When he met
them, they jumped him, tore off his coat of many colors and threw him into a
pit. While they were debating how to dispose of him, one brother, Judah, saw a
passing caravan and talked his brothers into selling him into slavery.
They planned evil against him
But God planned-it-over for good.
The brothers meanwhile returned with a lie for their father. They dipped
Joseph’s coat into a goat’s blood and took it to Jacob. Their father
jumped to the conclusion that the brothers intended. "A wild beast has
killed my son," he cried. "I will wear my mourning clothes until I
die." And he almost did.
I think most of us live with the primal sense of being a "blessed
child" or an "unblessed child." Both have their spiritual
challenges.
The blessed child, like Joseph, is apt to live as if the world revolves
around him or her. They are the center of the universe. Life has a way of
challenging those assumptions, sometimes quite brutally. When life roughs us
up, when the world roughs us up, how will we then respond? What will happen to
our wounded grandiosity? Will we be good stewards of our misfortune, our
mistakes? Joseph shows the way.
III
Joseph was brought down to Egypt a slave. The text says: "Yahweh was
with him" – as God goes with us wherever we go, whatever the turns and
twists of our lives.
"The Lord was with Joseph." From his unlikely beginnings as a
slave Joseph achieved stunning success: First as an interpreter of dreams;
second as a statesman, the king’s right-hand man.
Joseph, like a cat, always landed on his feet. First he became trusted
servant of high ranking Potiphar, then the manager of his household. Being an
extraordinarily handsome young man, he also attracted women, and they brought
temptation. Genesis 39:6 says: "Now Joseph was fair of form and fair to
look at." The plot thickens. Joseph as Brad Pitt.
The Jewish Talmud has a story. One day a group of high society ladies came
to lunch at Madame Potiphar’s. She served citrus fruits and gave them knives
with which to cut them.
In walked Joseph. So bedazzled were the ladies that they went into a state
of shock and cut their hands with their knives. Madame Potiphar moaned:
"This is what I must endure day after day."
The next verses read like a daytime soap opera. She made overtures to
seduce him. Repeatedly he refused her advances. (That part is quite unlike a
soap opera.)
Then one day when the house was empty save the two of them, she moved
aggressively to win him. He ran away in a panic, leaving his cloak in her
hands. It was evidence enough.
She called the other workers in and, using the word "Hebrew" like
a racial slur, said, "This Hebrew tried to lie with me."
But it was his Hebrewness which gave Joseph the wherewithal to
resist, a life formed in the character of faith. And to resist not only her
but all the temptations of life in the Egyptian Empire.
He would not violate the trust his master had put in him. (Genesis 39:9).
Madame Potiphar made her accusation and, since she held the power in the
relationship, she had him thrown into prison. The Bible says that in
temptation God provided a way of escape, but this way is not always easy or
painless. For Joseph it meant jail.
She planned it for evil
but God was planning-it-over for good.
IV
Joseph in prison. Again the text says, "And the Lord was with
him." And again Joseph made the best of a bad situation. First he made
friends with the jailers. Before long he was administrative director of his
jail. Have you known people like that?! Joseph the cat had again landed on his
feet. But it was not just nimbleness. It was character.
Next he became the king’s private psycho-analyst and interpreted the
famous dream of the seven fat cows and the seven skinny ones. "There will
be seven years of bountiful harvest, then seven years of famine. If you use
the first seven well you can prepare for the next seven."
The Pharaoh said, "You’ve got a job!" And Joseph became
Secretary of Health, Education and Agriculture.
Because of Joseph’s shrewd administration Egypt not only survived but
took care of starving nations around its borders. That’s the plan of God for
nations especially blessed: They become a blessing to the nations around it. A
"light to the nations." That’s how God plans it. We don’t always
follow the plan.
During those years Joseph became a powerful prince, married an Egyptian
princess and had two sons, poignantly named Manashe, which means,
"For God has made me forget all my tribulation," and Ephraim,
which means, "For God has made me bear fruit in the land of my
misery."
V
The famine brings an unexpected turn in the story. Joseph’s brothers come
to Egypt seeking grain and end up in Joseph’s court!
The brothers did not recognize him, but he recognized them! When
they came and bowed down before him, the text says that he "remembered
the dream which he dreamed of them." You remember? The one of their
stalks of wheat bowing down to his.
But Joseph somehow discovered how to forgive them. He told them who he was
and set out to bring first his younger brother, Benjamin, and then their
father Jacob to Egypt for a family reunion.
What he said to his brothers displayed that he had been given a vision of
the larger Providence of God.
"Do not be pained that you sold me here," he said, "For it
was to save life that God sent me on before you here. God sent me here to save
the lives of many, and now even your lives. So do not waste yourselves
in grief. Go get father Jacob and bring him here." And so they did.
They would be afraid that one more time when Jacob died, and when Joseph
said to them:
Do not be afraid. For am I in God’s place? (That’s exactly how
he did see himself as a brash, spoiled young man.) No, you planned
evil against me, but God planned-it-over for good.
How has God, even this day, planned-over your life?
It’s what Paul glimpsed in the story of Jesus, his life, death and
resurrection:
We know that in everything (in the best of times and the worst of
times, when we’re doing our best and when we’ve done our worst), in everything
God works for good with those who love God, those called according to God’s
promises.
Hebrew tradition calls Joseph by the highest compliment you can give a Jew:
He is a Tzaddik, a just man, a righteous man, a deeply good person.
That’s what Joseph, facing all he had to face, became. How did we see it in
him?
He learned from his mistakes
He was a good steward of his suffering
He kept his word
He administered justice
He showed mercy
And he trusted in the Providence of God.
It was that trust that gave him a larger view, a greater hope and the grace
to say
You planned evil against me
but God planned-it-over for good!
