Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] One God who creates us, redeems us, and sustains us. Amen.
[00:00:06] All right, I need a quick survey who was here last week.
[00:00:09] No judgment. Okay, this is great.
[00:00:12] So you know when you tune in to your favorite television show and they're like in the last episode. Right. So we're going to get a little bit of. In the last episode of last week because I want to talk about the Joseph story.
[00:00:27] But you can't get to today without knowing what's happened before. And if you were here last week, how many of you did your homework?
[00:00:34] Okay, that's about what I expected. You're good. You're good. All right, I see you all outside. Good job.
[00:00:40] So Joseph, as you may recall, is the 11th son of Jacob. 12 tribes of Israel, 12 sons of Jacob, and he's number 11. And as a young man, maybe a teenager, he had these dreams. He. And then he foolishly told his brother his dreams, which was they would all bow down to him and he would kind of be, you know, the head honcho. They didn't like this especially. Come on. Number 11 out of 12. Like, you don't have that. No.
[00:01:13] So they throw him in a pit, they sell him into slavery. He ends up in. And that's where we ended last week. But then in between, he goes into Egypt, he becomes the servant to Potiphar, and then Potiphar's wife does him wrong, gets him thrown in jail. He thinks he's going to spend the rest of his life in jail. But then Pharaoh throws his manservant and his chef into jail. And they both have dreams, and Joseph interprets them. The chef ends up dying at Pharaoh's hand, but the manservant goes back to serve Joseph. And when Pharaoh has these dreams that. About anyway, cows coming out of rivers, and it's a whole long story. We don't need to go there. But he has these streams. Doesn't know what they mean. And the manservant says, wait, there's this really great guy in jail who can tell you. So he comes at Joseph, comes out of jail, explains it to Pharaoh, and says, you're going to have seven years of plenty. And we need to store everything up, because then you're going to have seven years of famine. And. And we need to be able to get through the famine. Right?
[00:02:25] So Joseph's brothers are living off in Cana. They don't have anybody telling them this. And so they've already come to Egypt once with all of their goods to sell, to get food to feed their families and their livestock.
[00:02:40] Joseph Knows who they are, doesn't reveal who he is.
[00:02:45] And they left Benjamin at home with Jacob, the youngest.
[00:02:49] Long story, why that? But anyway. But Joseph sends them back to Cana filled with food and with all of their money in their sacks.
[00:03:00] And then they send the brothers. But then the brothers come back again because they've run out of food. But Joseph had said, don't come back unless you bring your youngest brother, because I don't believe you all.
[00:03:16] And clearly Joseph knows what going on and he wants to see. Benjamin is his full brother, his only full brother.
[00:03:25] So they, the brothers come back this time with Benjamin again.
[00:03:30] All of their goods, all of their money, please help us, save us. They still don't know who Joseph is. There's a whole bunch of trickery we aren't going to get into. And we get to today, today, and here is Joseph and he is going to reveal who he is to his brothers. And so he sends all of his Egyptian servants, right? The non Egyptian is in charge of Egypt, sends all the Egyptian servants out of the room so he can have this wonderful private moment with his brothers where he begins to weep loudly. And last week I said, you know, I wondered what Joseph thought. What did he think when he was in the pit? What did he think when he was being bound and sent off into slavery? And all of his brothers are going like, see ya, right? But this week we know what Joseph thinks.
[00:04:20] We know how deeply, both I would imagine, painful and joyous it was for him to reunite with his brothers. He cries loudly as he tells them who he is. And then he cries at the end and he hugs Benjamin and then he hugs all of them and everybody's weeping in this whole nine yards.
[00:04:40] But I want to think about this.
[00:04:45] Joseph chooses relationship over being right.
[00:04:54] Joseph, in his emotional sense of reuniting with his brothers, understands that relationship is more important.
[00:05:05] And the brothers, they are a little horrified, if you notice. They're stunned silent. They don't say anything for a while. Now I can imagine they're kind of like, wait, didn't we send him away so we wouldn't have to do this?
[00:05:19] But he's also saving us so we'll live and not die of starvation. There's got to be some conflict coming in there.
[00:05:30] And in fact, they could have refused his generosity, right? You can refuse to be in relationship.
[00:05:38] You're still in relationship, though. Just letting you know.
[00:05:41] But they could have refused the gift. They could have gone back to Cana with Benjamin and said, sorry, dad, we got nothing. We don't. You know, not even say that Joseph was still alive.
[00:05:54] But Joseph can save them and their families.
[00:05:59] And yes, it also means I'll just wait.
[00:06:09] As a fifth grade teacher, I can wait till, you know, the noise settles down and then keep going.
[00:06:15] But Joseph ends up offering them the most important gift. And that's not the gift of food, and that's not the gift of safe haven in the middle of this famine. He offers them the gift of extravagant forgiveness, Extravagant, undeserved forgiveness. And in that, forgiveness offers them the other gift of right relationship.
[00:06:49] Because here's the thing, like I said, you're never really out of relationship. You can send your brother off into slavery and tell your dad that he was killed by wild animals and you're actually still in relationship with that person.
[00:07:01] You're just not in right relationship with that person.
[00:07:06] And what Joseph offers is the restoration, the redemption of the relationship that the brothers threw away.
[00:07:17] Now the brothers are sitting there a little bit astounded, and Joseph gets this and says, look, just so you know, I'm not trying to trick you, right? I'm not trying to say, oh, it's going to be okay, and then I'm going to pull the rug out from under you, even though you might have done that yourselves.
[00:07:35] Joseph says, don't feel badly.
[00:07:38] Don't blame yourselves for selling me, because that was God at work.
[00:07:44] God sent me here ahead to save your lives, all of our lives, our family's lives.
[00:07:52] And so I don't believe God does bad things to make good happen. That's just not my God. But I do believe that our relationship with God, the love of God, the mercy of God, can redeem the bad things that happen in our life.
[00:08:11] And I loved how one commentator put it. They said Joseph's brothers may have sold him, but God sent him.
[00:08:20] And in sending him, Joseph was able to redeem that.
[00:08:25] Joseph could have the ability to understand how the bad that happened in his life could be redeemed into something that was life giving and relationship restoring.
[00:08:40] Despite all the wrongs, Joseph still loves his family.
[00:08:45] Do you hear him begging for his father in the reading today?
[00:08:50] And Joseph opted for relationship over being right.
[00:08:57] Or my favorite, being righteously indignant, which I think most of us would agree he had a right to be if he wanted to.
[00:09:04] But Jesus ends up doing the same thing in the gospel today.
[00:09:10] Very similar.
[00:09:12] Now, Jesus, I love Jesus today. I love this passage because he's so real. You know, we always think of Jesus, you know, God, Jesus healing Jesus. And this is like real human Jesus. He went away to pray. And 5,000 people followed him. And then they demanded dinner. And then he went away to pray again and put the disciples out on a boat so he could have some quiet time. But no, this big storm comes up. So now he's got to go walk out on the sea, get the disciples all settled, right? And now he's in a new area. He's over in Tyre and Sidon. And this woman, this Canaanite woman, comes up to him and is like, I need my daughter healed.
[00:09:55] What parent wouldn't do that, right?
[00:09:58] I need my dad. Please heal my daughter. And Jesus, he's tired and he is doing this thing over here, and he doesn't have time for her and for all these other people who are thronging him, wanting healing and this and that. Only this woman, she's persistent.
[00:10:17] And when she doesn't get through to Jesus, she goes to the disciples. And then the disciples get annoyed with her, and they go to Jesus and are like, dude, you gotta help us out.
[00:10:28] This is. And he's like, I don't have time for this.
[00:10:32] I am taking care of my business over here that I was sent to do. And then the woman, not Jesus, the woman, I don't want to say forces the relationship, but forges the relationship. And she goes. And she falls at Jesus knees and says, please, Lord, help me. And Jesus is still cranky, and he says, not even.
[00:11:00] And you know, you don't deserve this. You know, the dogs, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she comes back at him.
[00:11:07] She comes back at him and says, oh, no, that is not how it is. And in her persistence, she forges a relationship between the two of them in which Jesus could finally hear what she was asking. And he gave her mercy.
[00:11:26] He granted her daughter the healing that she was so desperate for.
[00:11:33] And I love. I love that line in the Romans. Today, God makes sure that we all experience what it means to be outside so that he can personally open the door and welcome us back in.
[00:11:49] Joseph's brothers were on the outside.
[00:11:53] The Canaanite woman was on the outside.
[00:11:58] So we have Jesus and we have Joseph. And then that brings us to us, right?
[00:12:05] We can talk about scripture all day long, but if we don't take it into our hearts and into our lives, then how are we being people of faith?
[00:12:16] So I wonder, how do we take this message of extravagant forgiveness and extravagant mercy out into our world today?
[00:12:26] I called Joseph's story a soap opera last week. And I dare say that we all have our own soap operas and family and friend dramas working their way out in our lives.
[00:12:40] Or as I like to say, we're all just living life, right? This is a part of it.
[00:12:46] But I also know that our society here in the United States is incredibly divided and divisive, and relationships are fracturing daily.
[00:12:58] And so I wonder, given the readings today, how do we engage in putting relationship before being right? And I don't mean like right, left, right. I mean being correct, right?
[00:13:13] Just to be clear, how do we choose God's love and mercy and forgiveness that takes place in relationship over being right, righteous?
[00:13:35] It's a choice, and it's not an easy one.
[00:13:40] And you and I gathered here, we may be in the position of Joseph, who holds all the power and can extend out to others, or you may be the Canaanite woman who is on the outside and trying to find that way in, where we are persistently hoping for a better relationship, we are persistently hoping for mercy to be granted to us.
[00:14:12] But I believe the lesson in our scripture readings today is to take a good look at our relationship, including those who we think that we are no longer in relationship with.
[00:14:28] And we need to ask ourselves, where do we need to listen to the person who is calling out to us?
[00:14:37] Where do we need to broaden our understanding of another person's pain and point of view?
[00:14:47] And most of all, where is God's extravagant love, extravagant forgiveness, and extravagant mercy?
[00:14:59] Calling you to be a faithful servant of God today?
[00:15:05] Amen.
