![Picture](/uploads/5/3/1/4/53145165/published/img-20170605-114839_1.jpg?1552319955)
Peter JB Carman
Emmanuel Friedens Church,
Schenectady New York
February 24, 2019
Genesis 45:3-15
Luke 6:27-38
I.
Our travel through scripture this morning takes us to the dawn of Judaism’s written history, back to the beginning, the Genesis of the story. It takes us back to North Africa, many, many hundreds of years before the birth of Christ. Genesis takes us back to visit Joseph in Egypt.
For those who know little of the story of Joseph, it might not have much significance—beyond being a great story about one alienated family getting it back together. But if we know the background a little, it takes on even more meaning. This is a story about spiritual ancestors.
Famine has struck the ancient world, driving the children of the Ancestors Jacob, Leah and Rebekah to go far from their home, to Egypt, where, they are told, Pharaoh has stockpiled grain. So, they go, hoping to bring home a little hope for their hungry families. They arrive in Egypt.
Looking for help, they appear before the Pharaoh’s head administrator. Over and over he tests them, he repeatedly puts them on the spot. Finally, he traps them. When the sons of Jacob--Judah, Reuben, the others--are in danger of losing their little brother Benjamin to this man, they discover that the person to whom they have been appealing for food, and for mercy, is none other than their own brother, Joseph.
Ah, what a relief, you may say. But the devil is in the details. The story has a wicked twist. Joseph is the brother whom the older brothers have disinherited and abandoned. Long ago, it was this Joseph whom they first left to die in a pit, and then, finding it more profitable and less hard on their consciences, sold into slavery. Now here they are, looking for mercy and help from the one person in all the world who owes them not a grain of gratitude, not a kernel of mercy. They are here begging from the one person who is least likely to help them.
A tough moment it is: a moment of reckoning.
In that moment, not only does Joseph forgive his siblings—he claims the moment. He tells them that while they may have THOUGHT they were the ones who did it all, it was, truly, not they who sent him there at all! It was God sent him, God, who, using their homicidal jealousy and their self-serving betrayal, sent him to prepare a way. It was God who sent him to make possible the survival of not one nation but two, to save all Egypt and save his own people: "And now, do not be distressed or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.... And 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..."
II.
No wonder that, through the years, exiles and sojourners—the disinherited and the enslaved—have identified Joseph in Egypt for their sense of purpose, for courage, for identity. Remember the words of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song? They made me sing this song in a church in Aracaju, Brazil, in 2014. Everybody sang along. They didn’t know any English, only Portuguese. But this song they knew, they knew all the words.
Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit
But my hand was made strong
By the hand of the Almighty
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly
Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
'Cause all I ever have
Redemption songs
Redemption songs[i]
In this imaginative, creative, redemptive moment, confronting his tormentors and long-lost kin, Joseph reclaims his own history, his own identity. Unwilling to give in to the temptation to see himself as merely the victim of human jealousy, greed and oppression, he perceives the hand of God tracing its own purpose in his life, reaching for ends beyond the imagining of the cruel actions of arrogant people. He sees in his life the surprising hands of God, sending him for a purpose, despite and through the jealousy and resentment of his half-siblings.
Joseph refuses to let himself be ruled by the mindset of human retribution. He refuses to let the wrongness of his brothers' action in abandoning and betraying him set the pattern for his own life. The starting point for his life is the intention of God, God who wants to be merciful and good, to suffering people. But God needs hands.
Surprising hands! As God is merciful, so Joseph chooses mercy, reaches out with an open hand to the family which so harmed him. Just as God longs to be reunited with the people who so readily turn away from everything holy, so Joseph longs to be reunited with the family he had lost, but now has found. Somehow through all the harsh experiences, through all the years, even through his own flawed character, and even through a rapid rise to influence and power, Joseph has been able to keep a sense of self—of who he is, of his own humanity, and his own being as a chosen creature of the Holy. Rejected, abused, enslaved and imprisoned, he somehow still knows who he is. Discovered, celebrated, appointed, empowered, he somehow rises up not only to advance his own cause but to keep a starving Egypt alive, and to save his own people. How does he do it? How does he know who he is?
My teacher Cornel West, in his first book, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, as he dives deep into the history of Black folk in this nation, muses on this question—How do we know who we are when all the world is doing its best to take it away? Thirty-seven years after its publication, the book is well worth going back to. Says Professor West: The perennial questions of “Who am I?”, “What is a human being?”, “What is an American?”, and “What is an Afro-American?” are central to the predicament of black people.”
Searching for answers, West turns to a sentence from Ralph Ellison’s story “Juneteenth”. Quoting Ralph Ellison: “We know who we are by the way we walk. We know who we are by the way we talk. We know who we are by the way we sing. We know who we are by the way we dance. We know who we are by the way we praise the Lord on high.” [ii]
III.
Another era, another time of suffering. Another nation! As Jesus was getting to the heart of that remarkable address to a multicultural crowd on a level place, delivering his take on revolutionary faith, he offered these words:
"But I say to you that listen,
Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also;
and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.
Give to everyone who begs from you;
and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.
Do to others as you would have them do to you.
These words have been misused over the centuries: misused in upstate New York, as Sojourner Truth testified in her memoir, to tell those held in slavery to be docile; women to remain subservient; the abused to remain silent. Those of us in the mainstream of Christianity need to confess honestly the way we—our tradition and ancestors, have manipulated the words of Jesus to justify abusive power.
And yet nothing could be further from the intention of the teaching. Mohandas Gandhi found in the same words of Jesus a blueprint for mass non-violent direct action! Martin Luther King Jr. picked up the stream of thought to organize strategically in this country. But Christianity has carried the seeds of deliverance. On March 2, 1955, sixty-four years ago this week, a teenage girl put the principles in Luke chapter 6 in action: nine months before Rosa Parks and the NAACP started the Montgomery Bus Boycott. not yet 16 years old, Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to rise when a white person demanded a seat on a Montgomery bus. Colvin described her arrest during the court case challenging the constitutionality of segregated seating on buses: "I kept saying, 'He has no civil right... this is my constitutional right... you have no right to do this.' And I just kept blabbing things out, and I never stopped. That was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person."[iii]
And how do we find the strength to live like this, how do we practice a Christianity that is such a profound departure from how we usually do business? How does a teenage black girl in Alabama in 1955 do something so brave that, in the words of her pastor as he bailed her out, “she … brought the revolution to Montgomery”?
God has surprising hands in the world. Those hands are not usually the folk who start out powerful, the influential, the wealthy. But often they are the ones who remember who they are—and whose they are. They are the ones who remember that they are children of God, and children of Joseph in Egypt. They are the ones who remember who they are, when the moment comes. And that memory gives them the strength and grace, claims how they walk, how they dance and how they praise their God most high.
_____________________
[i] The final track on Bob Marley & the Wailers' ninth album, Uprising, the song picks up wording from Marcus Garvey, in an address delivered in Sydney Nova Scotia and printed in Black Man 3 Number 10, July 1938. “ We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.”
[ii] West, Cornel, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1982, p. 89. Professor West is quoting Ralph Ellison in “Juneteenth”, Quarterly Review of Literature, 1965, p. 276.
[iii] Claudette Colvin’s story first came to my attention visiting the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma, Alabama two decades ago. There is a thorough article and good links to quotations contained in the Wikipedia piece on her, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudette_Colvin.
Emmanuel Friedens Church,
Schenectady New York
February 24, 2019
Genesis 45:3-15
Luke 6:27-38
I.
Our travel through scripture this morning takes us to the dawn of Judaism’s written history, back to the beginning, the Genesis of the story. It takes us back to North Africa, many, many hundreds of years before the birth of Christ. Genesis takes us back to visit Joseph in Egypt.
For those who know little of the story of Joseph, it might not have much significance—beyond being a great story about one alienated family getting it back together. But if we know the background a little, it takes on even more meaning. This is a story about spiritual ancestors.
Famine has struck the ancient world, driving the children of the Ancestors Jacob, Leah and Rebekah to go far from their home, to Egypt, where, they are told, Pharaoh has stockpiled grain. So, they go, hoping to bring home a little hope for their hungry families. They arrive in Egypt.
Looking for help, they appear before the Pharaoh’s head administrator. Over and over he tests them, he repeatedly puts them on the spot. Finally, he traps them. When the sons of Jacob--Judah, Reuben, the others--are in danger of losing their little brother Benjamin to this man, they discover that the person to whom they have been appealing for food, and for mercy, is none other than their own brother, Joseph.
Ah, what a relief, you may say. But the devil is in the details. The story has a wicked twist. Joseph is the brother whom the older brothers have disinherited and abandoned. Long ago, it was this Joseph whom they first left to die in a pit, and then, finding it more profitable and less hard on their consciences, sold into slavery. Now here they are, looking for mercy and help from the one person in all the world who owes them not a grain of gratitude, not a kernel of mercy. They are here begging from the one person who is least likely to help them.
A tough moment it is: a moment of reckoning.
In that moment, not only does Joseph forgive his siblings—he claims the moment. He tells them that while they may have THOUGHT they were the ones who did it all, it was, truly, not they who sent him there at all! It was God sent him, God, who, using their homicidal jealousy and their self-serving betrayal, sent him to prepare a way. It was God who sent him to make possible the survival of not one nation but two, to save all Egypt and save his own people: "And now, do not be distressed or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.... And 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..."
II.
No wonder that, through the years, exiles and sojourners—the disinherited and the enslaved—have identified Joseph in Egypt for their sense of purpose, for courage, for identity. Remember the words of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song? They made me sing this song in a church in Aracaju, Brazil, in 2014. Everybody sang along. They didn’t know any English, only Portuguese. But this song they knew, they knew all the words.
Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit
But my hand was made strong
By the hand of the Almighty
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly
Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
'Cause all I ever have
Redemption songs
Redemption songs[i]
In this imaginative, creative, redemptive moment, confronting his tormentors and long-lost kin, Joseph reclaims his own history, his own identity. Unwilling to give in to the temptation to see himself as merely the victim of human jealousy, greed and oppression, he perceives the hand of God tracing its own purpose in his life, reaching for ends beyond the imagining of the cruel actions of arrogant people. He sees in his life the surprising hands of God, sending him for a purpose, despite and through the jealousy and resentment of his half-siblings.
Joseph refuses to let himself be ruled by the mindset of human retribution. He refuses to let the wrongness of his brothers' action in abandoning and betraying him set the pattern for his own life. The starting point for his life is the intention of God, God who wants to be merciful and good, to suffering people. But God needs hands.
Surprising hands! As God is merciful, so Joseph chooses mercy, reaches out with an open hand to the family which so harmed him. Just as God longs to be reunited with the people who so readily turn away from everything holy, so Joseph longs to be reunited with the family he had lost, but now has found. Somehow through all the harsh experiences, through all the years, even through his own flawed character, and even through a rapid rise to influence and power, Joseph has been able to keep a sense of self—of who he is, of his own humanity, and his own being as a chosen creature of the Holy. Rejected, abused, enslaved and imprisoned, he somehow still knows who he is. Discovered, celebrated, appointed, empowered, he somehow rises up not only to advance his own cause but to keep a starving Egypt alive, and to save his own people. How does he do it? How does he know who he is?
My teacher Cornel West, in his first book, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, as he dives deep into the history of Black folk in this nation, muses on this question—How do we know who we are when all the world is doing its best to take it away? Thirty-seven years after its publication, the book is well worth going back to. Says Professor West: The perennial questions of “Who am I?”, “What is a human being?”, “What is an American?”, and “What is an Afro-American?” are central to the predicament of black people.”
Searching for answers, West turns to a sentence from Ralph Ellison’s story “Juneteenth”. Quoting Ralph Ellison: “We know who we are by the way we walk. We know who we are by the way we talk. We know who we are by the way we sing. We know who we are by the way we dance. We know who we are by the way we praise the Lord on high.” [ii]
III.
Another era, another time of suffering. Another nation! As Jesus was getting to the heart of that remarkable address to a multicultural crowd on a level place, delivering his take on revolutionary faith, he offered these words:
"But I say to you that listen,
Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also;
and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.
Give to everyone who begs from you;
and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.
Do to others as you would have them do to you.
These words have been misused over the centuries: misused in upstate New York, as Sojourner Truth testified in her memoir, to tell those held in slavery to be docile; women to remain subservient; the abused to remain silent. Those of us in the mainstream of Christianity need to confess honestly the way we—our tradition and ancestors, have manipulated the words of Jesus to justify abusive power.
And yet nothing could be further from the intention of the teaching. Mohandas Gandhi found in the same words of Jesus a blueprint for mass non-violent direct action! Martin Luther King Jr. picked up the stream of thought to organize strategically in this country. But Christianity has carried the seeds of deliverance. On March 2, 1955, sixty-four years ago this week, a teenage girl put the principles in Luke chapter 6 in action: nine months before Rosa Parks and the NAACP started the Montgomery Bus Boycott. not yet 16 years old, Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to rise when a white person demanded a seat on a Montgomery bus. Colvin described her arrest during the court case challenging the constitutionality of segregated seating on buses: "I kept saying, 'He has no civil right... this is my constitutional right... you have no right to do this.' And I just kept blabbing things out, and I never stopped. That was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person."[iii]
And how do we find the strength to live like this, how do we practice a Christianity that is such a profound departure from how we usually do business? How does a teenage black girl in Alabama in 1955 do something so brave that, in the words of her pastor as he bailed her out, “she … brought the revolution to Montgomery”?
God has surprising hands in the world. Those hands are not usually the folk who start out powerful, the influential, the wealthy. But often they are the ones who remember who they are—and whose they are. They are the ones who remember that they are children of God, and children of Joseph in Egypt. They are the ones who remember who they are, when the moment comes. And that memory gives them the strength and grace, claims how they walk, how they dance and how they praise their God most high.
_____________________
[i] The final track on Bob Marley & the Wailers' ninth album, Uprising, the song picks up wording from Marcus Garvey, in an address delivered in Sydney Nova Scotia and printed in Black Man 3 Number 10, July 1938. “ We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.”
[ii] West, Cornel, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1982, p. 89. Professor West is quoting Ralph Ellison in “Juneteenth”, Quarterly Review of Literature, 1965, p. 276.
[iii] Claudette Colvin’s story first came to my attention visiting the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma, Alabama two decades ago. There is a thorough article and good links to quotations contained in the Wikipedia piece on her, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudette_Colvin.