University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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Genesis 45:1-15
A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham
University Presbyterian Church
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
August 15, 2010

            Of course, none of this favoritism was lost on Joseph’s brothers.  In the musical version the brothers confessed, “Being told we’re also-rans/ does not make us Joseph fans.”[1]  And so later, when Joseph told his brothers about a dream that went beyond his role as favorite son and suggested broadly that he would one day rule over them, they weren’t amused.  Presented soon thereafter with an opportunity to do him in, they threw Joseph into a cistern, and then later sold him into slavery to a band of Ishmaelites, who carried Joseph off to Egypt. There an army man named Potiphar purchased him, and it was in Potiphar’s service that Joseph got into an embarrassing misunderstanding with Potiphar’s wife (one of the highlights of the musical version) and ended up in jail. (That particular scene seemed so delicate that Rice and Webber feared audiences would think they’d taken liberties with the Biblical text, so they had their narrator-chorus sing, “It’s all there in chapter thirty-nine.”)[2]

            During Joseph’s imprisonment, Pharaoh “got wind of the fact that [the young man] was big on dream interpretations and had him sprung to see what he could do with a couple of wild [dreams] he’d had himself.  And when Joseph passed with flying colors, Pharaoh promoted him to be [something like] head of the Department of Agriculture and eventually his right-hand man.”

Years later, Joseph’s brothers, who had long since succeeded in putting him out of their minds, turned up in Egypt, too, looking for something to eat because they were having a famine back home.  Joseph knew who they were right off the bat, but because he was wearing his fancy uniform and speaking Egyptian, they didn’t recognize him. Joseph couldn’t resist getting [back at them] for a while. He pretended he thought they were spies. He gave them some grain to take home, but made one of them stay as a hostage. He planted some silverware in their luggage and accused them of [stealing] it…. Though with part of himself he was presumably getting a kick out of all this, with another part he was so moved and pleased to be back in touch with his own flesh and blood after so long that every once in a while he had to get out of the room in a hurry so that they wouldn’t see how choked up he was and discover his true identity.[3]

All of which brings us to our passage for this morning, which is the story of Joseph’s reunion with his brothers – the very heart and climax of the Joseph story.  Here is Joseph, risen to be everything his boyhood dream had said he would be, face to face with the brothers who abandoned him into slavery.  It is a moment fraught with all kinds of possibilities for revenge and recrimination… but it becomes a moment of tearful reunion.  Instead of revenge, what Joseph gives his brothers is forgiveness… and more than that, he says that their old act of jealousy and anger had become nothing less than the tool of divine providence.[4]

            Joseph tells his brothers that they need not be distressed or angry with themselves, because what they did so long ago was woven by grace into the fabric of God’s providence.  It is, says Michael Lindvall, the intertwining of human causes and divine intention that forms the theological genius of the story. And later, when Joseph returns to Canaan to bury his father Jacob, he will say it even more directly to his siblings. “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good….” (50:20)

            The story of Joseph is a rich story for study and for preaching. Even our small part of that story this morning is full of possibilities.  But the truth remains that the story of Joseph’s reunion with his brothers hinges upon a rather simple, yet deeply stunning moment of forgiveness.  While it is God’s providential care that weaves this story toward redemption, it is Joseph’s embrace of that tapestry through forgiveness that makes him God’s partner in the restoration.

            David Noel Freedman is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible who has memorized entire chapters of Old Testament passages… in Hebrew. Now an older man, he lives with “one foot planted in Judaism and the other in Christianity.” His life has been immersed in the study of scripture.  Once, when he was asked if he could summarize all that he had learned from Scripture in one sentence, he thought for a moment and gave a three-word answer, “There is forgiveness.”[5]

            There is forgiveness. Michel Lindvall says, “The forgiveness that runs like marbled veins through the bedrock of Scripture moves in two directions. It cuts vertically and it splinters out horizontally. Our faith trusts that it runs downward from God to this world; and then it spiders outward, horizontally, as one forgiven soul forgives another.” That is the movement of grace we symbolize week after week in this place when we claim the forgiveness of God for ourselves and then extend the peace one to another. It is the same movement Joseph showed to his brothers when he told them who he was, inquired about his father, embraced them tearfully and joyfully, and promised them food and shelter. It is a movement we celebrate whenever we see it acted out, but it is so difficult at times to embrace and embody such movement; indeed, it often seems easier to choose a path of less resistance, so that we can nurse our anger and act out our revenge.

            There is a moment in Pat Conroy’s latest novel, South of Broad, in which the story’s narrator/protagonist, Leo King, a teenager at the time, asks his father’s counsel.  One of Leo’s high school classmates, an arrogant, aristocratic friend named Chad, had masterminded a prank that was intentionally cruel and humiliating to two of Leo’s friends.  Leo is furious when he finds out.  In time, Chad apologizes for what he has done. Leo turns to his father and asks, “Do I have to forgive Chad tonight? Or can I go on hating him for another month or two?” Nursing the anger seemed so righteous. But with the wisdom of experience his father answers, “Here’s what you don’t know about time, son. … It moves funny and it’s hard to pin down. Occasionally, time offers you a hundred opportunities to do the right thing. Sometimes it gives you only one chance. You’ve got one chance here. I wouldn’t let it slip out of your hands.”[6]

            Still, forgiveness is hard, and it seems so much more emotionally satisfying to hold onto grudges or to exact revenge.  Charles Moore writes,

The instinct to even the score feels so intrinsic, so basic, that it’s hard to conceive of any other way to respond to acts of injustice…. Revenge is powerful, and sweet.  It makes its opposite, forgiveness, seem infantile – some kind of religious trick…. Doesn’t forgiveness only seduce hurting people into putting up with wrongs [they don’t] deserve? Forgiveness [seems] neither fair nor right.

But if … history teaches us anything, vengeance – under the guise of justice – has gotten us nowhere. In our ill-tempered… world, fairness, or getting even, is paying a heavy toll: drive-by shootings, vehement talk on [television and] radio… shooting sprees at school.  If [retaliation] is our moral right, why isn’t our world morally better [because of it]?

The problem with eye-for-an-eye fairness, [says] Lewis Smedes, is that “it never gets what it wants; it never evens the score.  The chain reaction set off by every act of vengeance always takes its unhindered course. It ties the injured and injurer to an escalator of pain, an escalator that never stops, never lets anyone off.”[7]

            It is true for individuals, and it is true for communities and peoples and nations.  Emotionally satisfying though it may be for a season, vengeance ultimately deepens our wounds. Without forgiveness, how often we find ourselves stuck on that escalator of pain. Without forgiveness, how hard it is to let go of a past that holds us captive. Without forgiveness, how impossible it is to imagine how to get ourselves off the dime and move toward healing. The wise South African writer Alan Paton once wrote, “There is a hard law…When an injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive.”[8] 

            Two summers ago, Marla and I had the privilege of joining two other UPC families in a visit to Paton’s native land. While we were in the Cape Town area, we paid a visit to Robben Island, seven kilometers off the coast in Table Bay. It was on Robben Island, long a place of isolation and confinement for political prisoners, that Nelson Mandela and other critics of the South African apartheid regime were imprisoned. If you saw the film Invictus last year, you saw the island and the prison cell where the future president of South Africa was kept 26 years in confinement.

            The film captured what was, for me, one of the most astonishing things that happened when apartheid – that officially sanctioned system of racism – ended and the black majority finally came to power in 1994. Virtually every knowledgeable observer had expected that those days would bring reprisals and an angry turning of the tables. Given the harshness of the treatment of black South Africans during apartheid, such expectations were reasonably grounded. But they didn’t take into account the mind and heart of Nelson Mandela. Mandela knew that in order to govern South Africa effectively, he would need the support of all elements of South African society. He pledged in his inaugural address to unite the people of South Africa. Against the counsel of his advisors to release all of the white staff members of the presidential staff when he assumed office, Mandela implored the staff members to stay, saying he needed their experience as they worked together for racial harmony in the land.

            Perhaps most controversially, when his chief of security requested more men to help protect the president, Mandela gave his okay, but instructed his chief of security to add four white Afrikaners, ex-officers of the Special Branch division, which had had a hard-earned reputation for brutality against black resistance leaders in the past. When his security chief objected strenuously that they had reason to fear these men, President Mandela offered a compelling response. He said, “Forgiveness liberates the soul; it removes fear.” Today on Robben Island, former political prisoners serve as tour guides, and though their personalities are different, one thing they all highlight in unison is their strong belief in the politics of forgiveness.

            Their countryman, Bishop Desmond Tutu, also suffered many of the abuses of apartheid, and he, too, spent years in oppressive South African jails.  When independence came, Mandela asked Tutu to serve as a member of his country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was chartered to sift through the horrific details of atrocities, false arrests and summary executions and to recommend remediation.  There were many voices understandably calling for revenge and retribution, and some who acted them out on their own, but like Nelson Mandela, Tutu offered his nation an alternative and, in that alternative, offered also a future. He did it by speaking six very wise words: “There is no future without forgiveness.”

            What was true for South Africa is, of course, true for us.  There is no future without forgiveness.  How many of us have old wounds that fester and will not heal because we cannot forgive? How many people do we know who are stuck in some injustice or some old offense… or conversely, in some deep and debilitating guilt? We know our lives are “spiritually mummified” by years of holding on to unforgiven hurts.  We know this, but how hard it is to accept the invitation “to the dance of grace.”[9]

            It is hard because there are times when the wrong done to us has been so egregious and painful that we cannot relinquish it without cost.  To forgive another person is not to trivialize or dismiss or excuse the pain that was once inflicted.  Too often when we receive an apology we are tempted to wave our hand and say, “Don’t worry, it was nothing.” But, in fact, it was something. To forgive such a wrong may mean saying to oneself, “I have every right to remain angry, but I choose not to hold onto that anger any more. In choosing forgiveness, I am seeking a way to put the pain behind us.” Thus, in offering the gift of forgiveness, at the same time we give ourselves the gift of peace and healing. Such a gift is possible only when we finally see and understand that the world does not neatly divide itself between offenders and offended, but that all of us… that we ourselves… are in need of forgiveness.[10]

            Apparently Joseph understood all that. Even more, he seemed to grasp that God’s providential care had lifted him up in his time of distress…and to understand his part in extending the same kind of grace to his brothers.  He could have said, “I don’t have it in me to forgive them,” but indeed he knew that he did, for he knew that God had opened his clenched fist.

            In observing his hands unclenched - opened by God's grace - and choosing to extend his hands unclenched - opened in peace - Joseph shared with his brothers the kind of future-making forgiveness that's available to all of us...even all these generations later.  No matter what grudge or estrangement holds us back or weighs us down, forgiveness can open a door to the future… your future and mine.  Occasionally, time offers us a hundred opportunities to do the right thing.  Sometimes it only gives us one chance.  Today is the only guarantee we have.  We have a chance today. God has put it into our hands. I wouldn’t let it slip away.