For the Love of Good...

 “For the Love of Good…”

 

Genesis 45:3-11, 15
45:3 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.

45:4 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.

45:5 And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.

45:6 For the famine has been in the land these two years; and there are five more years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest.

45:7 God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors.

45:8 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.

45:9 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.

45:10 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.

45:11 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.'

45:15 And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them; and after that his brothers talked with him.

 

Who doesn’t like Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical, “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”? Of course the story is from the Bible, but the setting in the musical is as profound as it is entertaining! No matter how much imagination I may bring to the story of the sons of Jacob, his “favored son,” Joseph, and his unexpected sojourn in Egypt, I could never have come up with Potiphar as Elvis, or the over-the-top palette of colors displayed in the “Dreamcoat.” 

 

Today’s text could be called “the Big Reveal,” or in current pop culture, “The Masked Singer.” During a time of famine that threatened the land, Joseph’s brothers—the same ones who sold him into slavery—come to beg for food from the Pharoah’s staff, only to be reunited with their brother. It is certainly a story of forgiveness, on Joseph’s part, but that is another sermon for another time. Likewise, the gift of dream interpretation God gave Joseph is worth exploring, for it certainly may be a metaphor of God’s promise of granting wisdom when we pray for it, or what God may reveal in time of need when we trust the Spirit of God. That, too, may wait for another sermon. What grabbed me about this text this week is best summed up in verse 5: And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve lives.

 

Take some time to ponder moments in your life when God took something someone else meant for evil against you, or even when God just took a quite ordinary moment in your life, and transformed it into something good, something positive, or even something that bordered on the miraculous. I’ll bet your personal story contains a few of these gems. Here are a couple of mine.

 

Way back in 1976 or so, I was just getting my career in communications off the ground and still living at home in Oil City. As an enthused, young adult Christian, I was involved in an evening Bible study led by students and young adults that met in the home of a wonderful couple from my home church. They had a vital, “renewed” faith courtesy of a Lay Witness Mission that happened in the church, and pledged to open their beautiful home for Christian “sharing groups” and “Bible studies,” especially for young people. While I was “out and about” on my job, I would often stop by their house to have a cup of coffee with Marian, the wife in this kind couple, and to share God’s blessings and faith stories. She and her husband, Edwin, kind of became “spiritual parents” to the great numbers of youth and young adults who would gather in their home on Monday evenings, and we always enjoyed visiting with them when we had a chance. But this one afternoon, I just happened to stop by when their daughter was home on vacation from her post-college job in Philadelphia. (There’s another whole series of stories here about how the daughter and I grew up in the same church and same youth group, but those stories, too, are for a different sermon.) She joined her mother and I for a cup of coffee, and in the midst of a “catching up” conversation, I just suddenly blurted out, “I have to go to Franklin this afternoon, do you want to ride along?” In the moments after asking this surprising question that just seemed to roll off my lips, I found myself horrified. “Why did I say that?” “Woah, I don’t want her to get the wrong idea here!” “She’s on vacation and wants to spend time with her Mom.” These were just a few of the thoughts that ripped around in my head in the view moments after the inquiry. Of course it should be noted that I had always put their daughter on an extremely high pedestal. She was an inspiring Christian woman, a brilliant person, and quite beautiful, I might add. Then came a surprising response: “Mom and I were going to go shopping, but SURE, I’ll tag along with you.” She’s been tagging along with me for almost 45 years now, and I’ve never gotten over the rush I get when she enters the room. I’ve often thought about that one, simple moment when I made that first, “benign” invitation, and often wonder what might have happened, had I not stopped up to her Mom’s house that day. God can certainly do anything God wills to do, but in this case, I witnessed the hand of God taking an ordinary circumstance and turning it into something life-changing, certainly for me!

 

Several years later, while I was still working in the communications field, coordinating public access television stations in my home county, another “ordinary” incident became a “great reveal” for the next chapter of my life. I was up all night on a Friday, working with a local TV telethon, and planned to sleep in late on Saturday morning. There was a men’s prayer breakfast going on at our church as part of a week-long mission festival, and my wife, Dara, was helping cook and serve the breakfast. My phone rang at a very early time on Saturday, and it was Dara, asking if I could come help serve the breakfast, as a bigger crowd than expected had shown up. Since I would do anything for her, no questions asked, I got dressed and headed immediately for the church. Upon arriving, Dara met me with a deeply apologetic grin on her face: “I’m sorry, honey, but enough volunteers showed up to serve, so since you’re already here, why don’t you just go and grab breakfast with the guys.” So I did. And then, after the meal, the featured speaker began sharing his message, and soon the squirming started. This missionary’s story was so parallel to my own, up until he related that in the midst of HIS career in communications, God spoke to his heart: “Stop what you are doing, get yourself off to seminary, and prepare for the ministry!” His story had me on the edge of my seat, and when he repeated this sentence, I heard a jarring “voice” in my own head saying, “Today, this message is for YOU, Jeff!” At a time and a place where I did not intend to be on that Saturday, God called me into ministry, and again, my life was changed. 

 

The third story that comes to mind is not one of my own, but one I read in the “testimony” submissions of the Guideposts devotional magazine founded by Norman Vincent Peale. The story was submitted by a pastor and counselor (his name escapes me, and my copy of that magazine is lost in my filing system, currently). He had written a couple of books on psychological counseling from a Christian perspective, and had been interviewed on a number of TV stations concerning his work. He was on vacation with his family, at this point, and they had rented an RV and were traveling across the USA. As he related the story, they had pulled into a gas station to fill the RV and purchase some snacks for the road. As he was waiting for his family to return to the RV, a pay phone in a phone booth on the property began to ring. He laughed, remembering how TV sitcoms often parlayed this idea into a humorous story. But the phone just kept ringing and ringing. Then, he heard that “still small voice” in his head say, “Well, ANSWER IT!” So he sheepishly sauntered over to the phone booth and picked up the receiver. “Hello?,” he said, as he answered. The voice on the other end of the call was a young woman, who asked if this was Doctor so-and-so. “Y…E…S…it IS,” he answered, with the combination of mystery and curiosity one can imagine him having, as his name was invoked over a pay phone hundreds of miles from home by an unknown caller. “What can I do for you?” he inquired. The young woman, through a flood of tears, shared how her life had taken a negative turn, she was alone, and was contemplating taking her own life. As she prayed for the courage to dismiss these thoughts, she remembered seeing the pay phone answering doctor on a TV interview, and believed him to be an encouraging, compassionate counselor. As he was being interviewed on the show she was watching—several weeks before her crisis, I would add—they displayed the telephone number of the clinic he operated. She prayed to God to help her remember the number, that she might reach out. As she prayed, she said she had a vision of the number in her head, wrote it down, and made the call. The counselor went straight into his best listening mode and soon had calmed the woman down. He gave her a number of a friend who ran a counseling ministry near where she lived, and prayed with her over the phone. She promised to reach out to the friend, and said she would not hurt herself. As she expressed her gratitude, our pay phone counselor asked her where she got this phone number? She told her “vision” story, to which the counselor said, “Honey, I want you to know just how MUCH God loves you! I’m standing at a pay telephone in a phone booth in Wyoming, and I’m on vacation with my family. Only God knew where I was today, and where I could be reached!” They both ended the call with tears of joy for the goodness of God, and for a life saved. 

 

These stories are in the mold of the wonderful Joseph story today’s text partly relates from the Bible. They are not stories of an intended “evil” against anyone, but they are stories of how God can do life-changing things in the most simple circumstances in which we find ourselves—a simple encounter, an unexpected men’s breakfast meeting, or a ringing pay phone. 

 

Later in Genesis 45 we read: 

 

¹⁸ His brothers also came and fell down before him and said, “Behold, we are your servants.”¹⁹ But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? ²⁰ As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people^[b] should be kept alive, as they are today.

 

In this same vein, the Apostle Paul would later write in Romans 8:28: “For God causes all things to work together for GOOD for those who love God, and are called according to God’s purpose.” In a day when so much negativity, polarization, and even hate seems to be all around us, are we not called as Christ-followers to be for the love of GOOD, as well as the love of GOD? Can we experience a rebirth of the belief that God DESIRES to “cause all things to work together for good” in our lives? My reading group joined the people of St. Paul’s UMC in reading and discussing the book, The Book of Joy, about a series of conversations between the Dalai Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu. These two great spiritual leaders could speak of joy and share joyous laughter together, both born out of lives of suffering and exile as they challenged the “powers that be” on their respective continents in the name of love and social justice. Again we see the Joseph model at work!

 

One of the popular descriptive formulas of the Trinitarian Godhead is: Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Put them together as our God working in the world and in our lives—even in the most difficult or mundane moments—and a four descriptor emerges: God as TRANSFORMER. As Joseph and his brothers found out, God can turn around sad stories, elevate victims, and even save the perpetrators. 

 

WHAT ARE YOUR STORIES of God walking with you to TRANSFORM your ordinary, unexpected, or even “evil” events into something miraculous? What are YOUR Joseph stories? As Christians, we follow a Savior who turned hate into love, vengeance into reconciliation, and death into life, all for the love of GOOD! Amen.