God Brings Us Together | Forgiveness, Reconciliation & Unity | Lakeside Light Podcast

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Let us pray.

Lord, by the power of your spirit, give us your words of life that our faith may increase and our hearts be made whole.

Amen.

Our first reading is from Genesis chapter 45, verses 1 through 15.

Genesis 45:1–15

Then Joseph could no longer control himself before all those who stood by him, and he cried out, Send everyone away from me.

So no one stayed with him when Joseph made himself known to his brothers.

And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it.

Joseph said to his brothers, I am Joseph.

Is my father still alive?

But his brothers could not answer him.

So dismayed were they at his presence.

Then Joseph said to his brothers, Come closer to me.

And they came closer.

He said, 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 ploughing 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 made 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, since there are five more years of famine to come, so that you and your household and all that you have will not come to poverty.

And now your eyes and the eyes of my brother Benjamin see that it is my own mouth that speaks to you.

You must tell my father how greatly I am honored in Egypt, and all that you have seen.

Hurry and bring my father down here.

Then he fell upon his brother Benjamin's neck and wept, while Benjamin wept upon his neck, and he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them, and after that his brothers talked with him.

Our next reading is from Psalm 133.

How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity.

It is like the precious oil on the head running down upon the beard, on the beard of Aaron running down over the collar of his robes.

It is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion, for there the Lord ordained his blessing, life forevermore.

For the word of God in Scripture, for the word of God among us, for the word of God within us.

O Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight.

O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.

Amen.

Well, we had a busy weather week here in Greater Cincinnati, didn't we?

This week.

I hope everyone is okay after our major storms on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday.

And I do know, I know some of y'all were out without power for a long time, even until Friday, so I hope everyone is okay now.

At the church, a couple stories.

At the church on Tuesday, when the tornado warnings hit, we were hosting our Creative Connections group.

If you don't know this already, so our Creative Connections group uh meets on Tuesday afternoons, and it is a support group for um caretakers of people with dementia and people with dementia, and they um what they do is they have uh all of the people dealing with dementia singing and doing movement together, and frequently caretakers can be in the next room and uh connect together as well while their uh loved ones are singing.

And um, so when the tornado warning hit, we had uh Peter uh on staff and John, he's giving away, and John Hodges Batsco were here, and they were like, we gotta go downstairs.

So we had a room full of uh uh folks in the chapel and a room full of people in the library who all had to go downstairs and be in the hallway.

My kids were there too.

Um where downstairs in the preschool hallway, they brought along their guitars and drums and continued to sing together in the hall.

So that was pretty cool.

Um and then I'm sure you had similar stories that afternoon.

My kids and I had to be a little creative getting home.

Um some of Dixie was was shut down, and so we had to go home.

We went via Pleasant Ridge Avenue.

Uh, some of you live on Pleasant Ridge, uh, so you may have seen this, but as we went down um Pleasant Ridge, the traffic was even harder than usual because the street uh was full of people.

Uh people were walking all up and down the street because there were swarms of neighbors who came out to help each other.

There were all these groups of people helping move branches and trees off of cars and out of people's yards.

I'm looking at Marie Bruce.

I was trying to see if the Bruces were here.

We saw them uh helping out neighbors, along with some other folks.

How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity.

I'm gonna tell you one more storm story from this week.

As some of you know, um on Wednesday morning, our church got a call from the Red Cross.

About a year ago, we as a congregation were approached by the Red Cross about the possibility of being an emergency site when something hit and they needed people to have a place to stay.

Um, and so about a year ago we got on a list, and then sure enough, on Wednesday we were called to see if we would be willing to be a shelter on Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning because there may be a need with all of the flooding and all the power outages, and so we said bring it on, right?

We said we're we're we're good to go, and we stood by.

Um, but by Thursday morning, uh it turned out they did not need us.

Kentucky, the Red Cross, Kentucky folks no longer needed shelters available, so they didn't need us.

And when the Red Cross coordinator called me to tell me that we would not be needed as a shelter, she was very apologetic.

She was very sorry.

And listen, if I'm being completely honest, I have to tell you, I was a little disappointed, right?

We would have been great, we would have been really good helpers, we would have learned so much, right?

We would have felt purpose after a storm.

And imagine the sermon illustrations I would have pocketed.

It would have been great.

But of course, would all of that good stuff have been worth people being in need of emergency shelter?

Absolutely not.

There was definitely no apology necessary from the Red Cross that they did not need people to spend the night in our amazing fellowship hall.

It was a good thing that we were not needed in that way this week.

Here's the thing: emergencies, storms, traumas, hardships.

These are often our greatest teachers, right?

Wisdom, growth is born of trial.

This is true.

This is true, and this can be true, while it can also be true that those gains do not make the trials worth it.

I love the way Rabbi Steve Leder puts this.

It's appropriate that we would quote a rabbi this morning after getting to Singh 133 in Hebrew.

Rabbi Leder would say, Is it worth it?

No.

Is it worthless?

No.

Nothing, he says, was worth the suffering, but neither was the suffering worthless.

Another thing he says that I like, if you're going through hell, don't come out empty-handed.

Joseph's story, the story in Genesis, it is full of trials.

It is full of ups and downs.

As we discussed last week when we read the beginning of some of that story, Joseph's brothers let jealousy curdle in them, and it turns into hatred.

And Joseph's story in many ways begins with a great act of cruelty when he is sold into slavery.

Joseph faces his own hell, but he certainly does not come out empty-handed, right?

In fact, Joseph manages to come out of his hell with so much power that he controls all of the grain in all of Egypt and its surrounding regions.

Which is why, by the time we get to today's reading in Genesis 45, it is now Joseph's brothers who have to bend under the thumb of Joseph and his power.

Joseph hardly wastes this power, by the way.

He makes his brothers more than squirm.

They come to Egypt hoping that they can get grain because they are in famine, they are starving, they are worried that they will die.

And so Joseph gives them a little hell as well.

Even though they are starving and weak, Joseph sends them back and forth from Egypt to Canaan, and then Canaan back to Egypt.

He holds their brother Benjamin hostage.

He tricks them in his own way.

And it is only when Judah, who by the way is the brother who suggested selling him as a slave, the younger brother, remember, maybe last week we talked about Reuben who advocated for Joseph.

It is only when Judah offers himself as a slave in order to rescue their youngest brother Benjamin.

So essentially doing, getting a do-over, right?

Getting to do the opposite of what he had done to his brother Joseph by offering himself instead of Benjamin, their other brother.

It's only after Judah does this that Joseph finally releases all of that manipulation and power play and all of that and reveals himself as their lost brother.

And it's at that point that he asks all of the servants to leave so that he can be alone with his brothers.

And Genesis says Joseph could no longer control himself before all those who stood by him, and he cries out, send everyone away from me.

So they all leave, and then Joseph weeps, reveals himself as their brother, and says, I am Joseph.

And then he asks, Is my father still alive?

So weeping.

And then notice this that the brothers are so overwhelmed that they do not say a word.

They're still processing, they don't say anything, they do not apologize, they do not repent, they don't even answer Joseph's question about his father.

But Joseph just barrels on, he keeps going.

And then notice this as well.

Just the way the brothers do not apologize, nor does Joseph forgive them.

Joseph doesn't actually forgive them.

This is kind of wild, right?

Because this story of Joseph and his brothers, it is thought of as one of the great stories of forgiveness.

So if forgiveness is a purely transactional ceremony, right, where one side apologizes or repents and another side says you are forgiven, that is not anywhere in this story.

But instead, something else happens.

Joseph lays out this bigger story.

Joseph zooms out and explains to his brothers how he has made meaning of everything that has happened in his life.

He details how he has made meaning out of this betrayal, this cruelty from his brothers.

And he lays out the ways that all of this meaning hinges on God's larger story.

Right?

This story at the end of Genesis is the linchpin that connects all of the Genesis story to all of the Exodus story.

We zoom out and we see God at work offering grace in a totally different way.

But the way Joseph articulates this, he says, the brothers sold him, but God sent him.

I am your brother Joseph, he says, whom you sold into Egypt.

And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here.

But God sent me before you to preserve life.

He uses this term, God sent multiple times.

God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth.

So it was not you who sent me here, but God.

So we're flagging.

Notice what's not happening in this story.

What is not happening here?

God is not the one who sells Joseph into slavery.

God is not the one who sold Joseph.

God is the one who sends Joseph.

The brothers sell.

They intend to do Joseph harm and they intend to do it at a profit, right?

God does not sell, though.

God sends.

So God takes the not worth it betrayal and hatred and profit mongering and reworks it into something that is also not worth it, but it is not worthless.

This distinction between the selling and the sending, it maybe feels a bit nitpicky, right?

But there's a huge difference here.

Because it is the difference between a God who puppeteers us into trauma and a God who walks alongside us in the griefs and the tragedies of our world.

It is the difference between a God who squeezes wisdom, squeezes growth out of us by inflicting suffering upon us to teach us something, and a God who creates space and grace enough that even our most difficult and most painful experiences can be the very experiences that send us.

Even the most difficult and painful of experiences can make way for something good, something great, something beautiful, maybe even something world-changing, as is the case for Joseph.

God does not place us in hell so that we can grab a few souvenirs on the way out.

Right?

But nor does God simply shelter us from ever dealing with the difficulties of our painful world.

And maybe God does sometimes nudge a souvenir our way as we're going through the hard things, right?

Maybe God does offer us something along the way and walk alongside us because we ultimately do get through, get past those valleys of the shadows of death, right?

Friends, we do not have to.

We should not accept the cruelties or tragedies of our world as simply meant to be.

We should not accept all of the ways that we inflict hardship on one another.

We can, we should work together to stop the unnecessary traumas, the ones born of jealousy or hatred or insecurity like those brothers experienced.

At the same time, we can accept that there will be storms, there will be values, there will be hardships, each of us will face deep grief.

Sometimes our communities will face storms.

But if we remember that God is walking alongside us in those things, that God is helping us turn them into something that is not worthless.

Maybe when those things happen, we'll be all the more ready to grab a guitar and sing anyway.

When those things happen, we will be all the more ready to join hands to move the tree stumps out of our neighbors' yards, right?

Friends, we can do our best to live together in unity, savoring those moments of harmony like precious oil or fresh mountain dew, like our psalmist does.

We can do that, and we can trust in a God who joins with us in making the hard things a little less worthless.

And we can trust that at that is the same God who will send us out and through, and who can create spaces of grace out of even the darkest of times or places.

And for that, thanks be to God.

Amen.

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Have a great week.