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gracewithducks · 7 years

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If it’s not okay, it’s not over yet. (Genesis 45:1-15)

It is really, really difficult to watch a movie with my seven-year-old daughter Michaela. It’s hard to watch a movie with Michaela, because either one of two things is true: either she’s seen the movie before, or she hasn’t.

And I hear you nodding, yup, those are definitely the two options, but what’s so bad about that? Let me tell you.

See, if Michaela has seen a movie before, she is absolutely insufferable about it. She’s the biggest spoiler-giver, plot-twist-ruiner you’ll ever meet… “Wait for this!” “What that!” “You might think that he’s a bad guy, but just wait…” and on and on she goes,and even if you’ve already seen the movie, she still will narrate it to you with glee… and friends, if there are any songs, she’s going to sing along with every single one. Whether she knows the words or not.

When she’s seen the story unfold before, she is pleased as punch, because she already knows how it’s going to end.

But for every movie she knows by heart, every story she’s an expert on – there are many more she hasn’t seen yet. And for Michaela, new movies can be very stressful; because she is an empathic little girl, because she cares and feels so very deeply, Michaela is always so very, very worried that this movie is going to be the one without a happy ending.

She hides her face; she cries and frets; she asks, desperately, “Is it going to be okay?”

And because we’ve told her so many times, she’ll say, “Movies always have a happy ending, right? If it’s not okay, it’s not over yet?”

Okay, so she hasn’t watched Old Yeller yet. Nobody tell her. Because my daughter has seen enough pain and sadness in this world, and she finds a lot of comfort, when she’s faced with even more pain and sadness on the movie screen, in knowing that everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, then it must not be the end yet.

So Simba finds his way home, and Elsa thaws the ice, and Cinderella marries the prince, and Anastasia finds her grandma, and the Ninja Turtles defeat Shredder, and the von Trapp family escapes over the mountains. Bad things happen, but in the end, it’s all okay. If isn’t not okay, it’s not over yet.

It’s a pretty good rule of thumb for the movies. And it’s a pretty good tagline for Joseph’s story, too. Joseph is sold into slavery, he’s falsely accused, he’s thrown into prison where he’s forgotten about for years… and if I were Joseph, there would have been plenty of times when I would have been tempted to give up, to weep and wail and wonder, “Why me?” But we never see Joseph doing any of that. Instead, he gets cured of his childish pride very quickly, and sets out to be honest, diligent, and faithful, wherever he ends up. He’s a trustworthy and faithful servant. He’s an honest and model prisoner. And even there, he finds ways to help others, to use the gifts God has given to bring some light into the darkness and hope into a hopeless place.

Somehow, Joseph keeps going. Somehow, he finds the faith to believe: this is not where my story ends. It’s not over yet.

Here’s the thing, though.

I always get nervous, when I get to a story like this one. I get nervous, for exactly the opposite reason that other stories make me nervous: so many times this summer, you’ve heard me cringe as we faced a shocking and unfamiliar part of the first family’s story… but today, today we are faced with one you might have actually heard before. I know that I remember hearing this story, or at least this part of the story, many times, always with the bottom line: what you meant for evil, God meant for good. People do bad things, but it’s okay, because it’s all part of God’s master plan, and it will all work out in the end.

How many times, in our worst days, does someone tell us, “God has a plan”? “This is all a part of God’s plan”? “The Lord works in mysterious ways”? It’s like – God is the scriptwriter, and sure, you’re in a really, incredibly dark and devastating and terrible part of the plot… but God just has a dramatic eye, and so God is building tension so it will be all the more moving when you get your happy ending in the end.

Bad things happen, just so God can make the happy ending even happier.

After all, that’s even pretty much what Joseph says: “Don’t worry, my brothers. Don’t feel guilty at all for wanting to kill me, for selling me into slavery, for letting our dear dad think I’ve been dead for all these years. Don’t worry, because it wasn’t you who did all those things – it was God; God sent me here, so that I could save your lives, and the lives of a whole lot of other people, when this famine came.”

And I don’t doubt that that’s what Joseph believes. I don’t doubt that he found great comfort in knowing that all the suffering in his life wasn’t pointless. Or at least, that’s what Joseph chooses to believe: he chooses to see his life through a lens of hope, trusting that, no matter what happens – the best, and the worst of it – God can redeem it; God can find a meaning for it all. But my goodness, didn’t he ever even wonder if God might have found another way to do it? Couldn’t God have saved the people from famine without Joseph having to be sold into slavery, dragged away from his home in chains, falsely accused by his master’s wife, arrested and thrown into prison, meeting the king’s cupbearer and baker there, interpreting their dreams for them, so that after forgetting him for many years, the cupbearer suddenly remembers Joseph and recommends him to the Pharaoh, who is being troubled by his own strange dreams of fat cows and skinny cows and cannibalistic ears of corn, so that Joseph is rescued from prison, able to warn the pharaoh of the great coming famine, and entrusted and empowered to make the necessary arrangements to set aside food so no one starves once the hungry years come?

It’s a foolproof and straightforward plan, yes? And it certainly wouldn’t have been easier for God to, I don’t know, give Pharaoh a clear warning in his dream: “Hey, a famine is coming, get ready for it!” … or give an Egyptian the power to interpret the dream, or arrange for Joseph to interpret the dream without having to languish in prison first. Or, you know, God could just not send the famine, maybe? Wouldn’t that be easier than playing puppet-master with so many lives and dreams? That would work, too.

And that, my friends, is why I shudder when I hear the underlying moral of this story to be: isn’t it great that God has such a wonderful master plan.

So if that’s not the moral of the story – what is?

It helps if we remember the bigger story we’ve been discovering this summer: while we’ve moved to the scale of kings of countries, this is still the story of a single family, Abraham and Sarah’s family, the family God chose to change the world.

When God called Abraham, God said, “I will bless your family, and through you, all the families in the world will be blessed.” God invited Abraham to be a part of a new vision, a new dream, a kind of world where people go beyond looking out for number one, beyond just securing a future for me and mine, beyond competing for limited resources – where families bless each other, where neighboring communities share resources, where people live like they really do believe that there is more than enough to go around.

That’s the dream that led Abraham and Sarah to leave everything behind and cross the known world: a dream of abundance, a dream of a world of peace and wholeness in a whole new way. But even from the beginning, they got it wrong. Abraham was willing to risk his wife’s honor and her life in order to preserve his own. Sarah couldn’t make room in their family story for Hagar and their son Ishmael. Abraham and Sarah’s remaining son, Isaac, couldn’t find enough love or enough blessing for both of his sons. And now one of those sons, Jacob, has so pampered his son Joseph that his other sons felt like they had no other choice but to get rid of the brat, selling Joseph into slavery and letting their father believe for years that his favorite boy was dead.

This is the supposed to be a family of abundance, a family whose very motto – “blessed to be a blessing” – reminds them that it’s not just about them. But in every generation, they’ve lost the plot.

And now they’ve reached a turning point: is this where the story ends? Or is it a story that really does keep going, to all generations?

Because we could feasibly call the promise fulfilled at this point; Joseph, in his rise to power in Egypt, has managed to save countless lives, by convincing the Pharaoh to put away enough grain to keep the people going through the long, lean years. Peoples have travelled from far around and found food – including Joseph’s own family, and many, many others. When considering this widespread famine, a disaster averted by one of Abraham’s great-grandsons, we could reasonably say: all the families of the known world have been blessed.

This could be where the story ends; God could wash God’s hands of this messed-up family and start over again. And Joseph himself isn’t helping.

I know, I said before that Joseph has matured and grown through his years of suffering. He’s not a spoiled bratty little brother anymore; he’s a grown man, a husband and a father, the second-most-powerful man in all of Egypt, a man who nevertheless knows and hasn’t forgotten how it feels to be forsaken in the pit, to be far from home, to be penniless, powerless, forgotten, and alone.

And when Joseph’s brothers walk back into his life, he’s right back there again.

He remembers. He remembers listening to them bicker over whether or not to kill him. He remembers how they turned their backs and counted their profits while he was dragged away in chains. And the fact that he’s all right now doesn’t undo all the heartache and the pain.

When Joseph sees his brothers, he starts to toy with them, savoring how the tables have turned. He accuses the brothers of being spies. He throws them into prison. He keeps one brother as hostage, sending them to bring their youngest back as “proof” that they’re not spies… and the brothers struggle, they drag their feet, because their youngest brother is Benjamin, the only other son of Joseph’s mother, and their father’s new favorite, who – after losing Joseph – dad now won’t let out of sight. Just to complicate it more, Joseph plants evidence on the brothers, so that they are afraid of being arrested as thieves. He forces them to come back groveling, bringing gifts to appease his temper… and he feasts with them, and just when they think all is well, he plants evidence on their youngest brother, and arrests Benjamin as a thief. But this stranger isn’t unreasonable: “I’ll just keep the thief as my slave,” he says, “and the rest of you can go back to your father in peace.”

And he sticks in the knife, and he turns it. Because these brothers have sworn on their lives to bring Benjamin back safely; they know it will break their father’s heart for good if they come back without him.

And maybe Joseph is testing his brothers, to see if they’ve really changed: to see whether, to save their own skins, they’ll leave another brother behind in slavery. Or maybe Joseph is just being cruel because he can, bringing back on his brothers a measure of the suffering they heaped on him.

Either way, I can only imagine him standing, secure in his own power, waiting to see what the brothers will do.

There is silence. A breathless pause. And then Judah steps forward.

Judah, an unlikely spokesperson for this broken band of brothers. Judah, whose idea it had been to sell Joseph into slavery all those years ago. Judah, not the oldest brother, not even a son of their father’s favorite wife. Judah, who is in almost every way just one of the extras in this story, one of the surplus sons mixed in to add to the drama and heighten the tension –

Judah steps up. And Judah says, “Please. Please. This, our youngest brother, is our father’s favorite son, his comfort in his grief, the joy of his old age. If we go home without Benjamin, our father may well die.

“I can’t go back without my brother. So please, my lord, please, keep me instead. Let me become your slave, and let me brother go.”

And just like that, Judah changes everything.

Instead of sacrificing his brother, instead of doing whatever he can to get ahead – Judah says, Let him go; take me instead. Let his suffering fall on me. Let me take his place.

Judah does what Isaac couldn’t, what Jacob couldn’t, what even Joseph couldn’t do yet: he loves his brother as himself. He puts his brother ahead of himself. And the family story starts to change once more.

It’s this speech by Judah that makes Joseph cry out, “I’m your brother; it’s Joseph; it’s me.” It’s this offer by Judah that convinces Joseph to reveal himself, and to embrace his brothers, and to forgive them, and to invite them to come and build their homes and settle their families alongside his own.

Judah finally gets it: it’s not about competing, tooth and nail, at any cost. It’s about sacrifice. It’s about standing together. It’s about love. And love changes everything.

Joseph may be the hero of the story, the one who saves the people from famine, who keeps the faith and graciously offers forgiveness in the end. But friends, years later, generations down the line – when the messiah is foretold, when the birth of the Christ is linked to the promises of Abraham, we don’t trace the family line through Joseph. We don’t trace the line through Rueben, the oldest brother, nor through Benjamin, the other most beloved son.

No, Jesus is a great-great-great-grandson of Judah, the brother who laid himself aside, the brother who realized that love is more important, the one who loved his brother more than he loved himself.

This is where the story changes. This is where the sun comes out from behind the clouds, where Michaela comes out from her hiding place, because this is where we start to see that somehow, it’s going to be okay. I still maintain that it’s been a roundabout and unlikely way of getting here, but here we are at last: Joseph saved from slavery, the people saved from famine, the brothers reconciled, and soon, the whole family reunited once more.

Everything changes, when Judah chooses to stand with his brother instead of against him. And still, in our own families, and in the world today, everything changes when we choose to stop competing and to stand together in love. To say, my brother’s problem is my problem. My sister’s struggle is mine, too. My neighbor’s need is my need. We are in this together: and instead of abandoning each other, we choose to stand together. And we will make a better story, together.

It’s always okay in the end, we tell our daughter. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end yet. Sometimes, you and I know, “okay” is a long time coming. But this is the promise and the hope of our faith: that God will never abandon or forsake us; and the terrible things that happen to us, they aren’t God’s plan – but God can use them, all the same; God can use even the worst parts of our lives, and break them open, and reveal amazing love hidden there.

We have one wall of our house at home that’s full of photographs: prints and snapshots of our family life. I love that wall, because it’s the only place I can see my dad alongside my children, and I can see Braeleigh playing next to Carl, and I can see my stepdad laughing next to my dad, too; it’s the only place I can see together all the people I love the most. It’s a hard thing, sometimes, to look in the faces of the people we’ve lost, and I don’t ever pretend to understand how it will all work out in the end, when we’re all together at last. But I still love that wall of pictures, because it reminds me that, for all the heartache we’ve faced, the constant thread running through my life, the constant thread in our family story, isn’t grief. It’s love. And love is worth it. And love never ends.

We all have messy stories, but God is in them all. And if it’s not okay, it’s not the end. God isn’t finished with us yet. Thanks be to God.

God, you know that we struggle sometimes to hold onto faith, when the problems we face are so overwhelming and senseless, and we don’t know where it all will end. You know that we struggle to forgive, to do unto others – even and especially our family and friends – to do unto others better than they’ve done unto us. You know how hard it is for us to hold onto hope; you know how hard it is for us to hold onto love.

So help us. Help us to believe that the thread running through our story, and through yours, is love – and when everything else falls away, love will hold us together; love remains. Love wins. Amen.

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