August 16, 2020, Belleville UCC - Genesis 45: 1-15
Ah, Joseph. What a great character from the stories we read in the Bible. The stories have become the stuff of legend and musicals and children’s books and adult novels.
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| Joseph recognized by his brothers, by Léon Pierre Urbain Bourgeois, 1863 |
And then, this moment where he and his brothers face each other after so many years.
Remember, when he was young, his brothers essentially sold him into slavery, covering their action by telling their father that Joseph had been devoured by wild beasts, bringing home the blood-stained coat of many colors.
This, after all, is the archetype of the dysfunctional family. On those days when you think your family is spinning out of control, you might take a bit of comfort in knowing that others have been there before you.
Of course, the Joseph story seems to have a happy ending. In the passage that Mary read today, Joseph forgives his brothers, they embrace and cry and they seem finally reconciled to one another.
Those of you who had the chance to be here last week or watch the service during the week heard Pastor Laura tell the powerful story of a statue of reconciliation and then the Biblical story of the reconciliation between Jacob - that would be Joseph’s father - and Esau, Jacob’s estranged brother whom Jacob had cheated out of his birthright. Jacob and Esau met face to face and embraced with tears flowing.
In our story today, after all of the twists and turns involving Jacob’s children from different wives, the brothers hug each other and tears flow.
The way this story often gets interpreted is as a call for us to embrace those we are estranged from, to move on together from the hurts of the past. That is certainly an ideal I think we all ought to strive for, even though the path to forgiveness can be a complicated one.
But I think this is also a story about power, how power shifts over time, how being conscious of how we use or are used by power is part of how we work our way forward as individuals and as a society.
John Lewis knew a lot about power. When he was a young man, he was part of the Civil Rights movement in this country, often finding himself on the losing side of power as he was arrested and sometimes beaten. Later, at age 48, he was elected to Congress, now someone in a position of power.
You probably heard a lot about John Lewis during the past month as the nation honored him after his death on July 17. One of my favorite stories about him has an interesting parallel to the story we heard today about Joseph.
In 1961, John Lewis was part of a group of young people on a Freedom Ride across the South trying to end legal segregation. They stopped at a Greyhound bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Lewis, who was Black, and one of his white compatriots went into the whites-only waiting area at the bus depot. A group of young white men assaulted them, beating them bloody with baseball bats. Elwin Wilson was one of those young white men. He became a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
But in his later years, Wilson was haunted by his beating of the two men in the bus station and his other actions. A friend asked him if he knew where he would go when he died. “To hell,” Wilson replied. And began to look for a way to make things right.
In 2009, he called the local newspaper in Rock Hill, told them what he had done and began his search for the two men he had beaten in the bus station. The white man, Albert Bigelow, had died in 1993. And then, to Wilson’s surprise, he learned that the other man - John Lewis - was now a member of Congress. The power dynamic had certainly changed.
Wilson arranged to visit Lewis in his Congressional office in Washington. He brought along his now middle-aged son. When they entered Lewis’ office, he got right to the point: “Mr. Lewis,” he said, “my name is Elwin Wilson. I’m one of the men who beat you in that bus station back in 1961. I want to atone for the terrible thing I did, so I’ve come to seek your forgiveness. Will you forgive me?”
Lewis, recalling that moment, said, “I forgave him, we embraced, he and his son and I wept, and then we talked.”
ABC News went back to report on that visit. I’d invite you to watch this brief clip from 2009. (During the sermon, I played the section from 0:21 to 1:20)
It’s a story of repentance and forgiveness that gives me so much hope. As John Lewis would say later, “People can change…people can change.”
It’s also a story, like the story of Joseph, about how power can shift in our lives.
When Joseph was a young man, he had plenty of arrogance and he thought his father’s protection gave him some sort of power. But it was brothers who really had the power. They were the ones who essentially sold him into slavery. And then thought they were rid of him.
Now Joseph has the power. At first, he uses his power to taunt his brothers, since they do not recognize him. He has accommodated so well to the royal life in Egypt that he is unrecognizable. Power can do that to a person, after all.
But Joseph also recognized that he could use his power for good. He finally revealed himself to his brothers, had them bring Jacob and his extended family to Egypt where there would be enough food for all. (Joseph’s mother, Rachel, had died by this time.)
You might think this puts a happy ending on the story. But in time, these Israelites who had moved to Egypt became the slaves of the Pharaoh. Power had shifted again. We’ll hear more about that next week.
For now, I’d just like to play with the notion of how power gets used not only in this story, not only in the story of John Lewis, but in our lives as well.
There are places in all of our lives where we have power.
And there are places where others have power over us.
There are places where people need to depend on our using what power we have wisely.
There are places where we need to depend on the wise use of powers by others.
Remember the twists of power in Joseph’s life.
As a slave to a captain of the Egyptian guard named Potiphar, Joseph did such a good job of winning his master’s favor that Potiphar put him in charge of his household.
And Joseph did such a good job of exuding charm that Potiphar’s wife repeatedly tried to seduce him and finally framed him as having tried to assault her.
His power was gone. He was in prison. He was victimized by the power of another and once again at the bottom of the power equation.
But he used what abilities he had to make friends among his fellow prisoners, interpreting their dreams. One of them eventually returned to his post in the Pharaoh’s court and eventually told the Pharaoh about Joseph’s ability to interpret dreams.
Once again, Joseph moved into a position of power and used his power to help Egypt prepare for the famine that he anticipated. In the process, his power and stature rose.
Power is like that, after all. It is not like motives and results are always pure. Joseph helped the people of Egypt. He also helped himself. Was he doing this for his own benefit first or for the community’s benefit?
That's the kind of question that is useful to ponder as we look at the ways we seek and use power in our lives and judge the use of power by others.
It’s a question that is never easy to answer, especially in the political arena where power seems to be used so much for personal aggrandizement, yet where that power also can protect or improve the lives of those who are most vulnerable.
Power exists in places other than the public arena, though. It exists within our families as well.
Families are not free from power struggles, whether between partners or between parents and children. The power dynamics change as children grow older, as they find themselves caring for aging parents. It’s never a smooth ride.
So we continually wind up considering the questions of what power we have and how best to use that power.
In our own families, I suspect we often take for granted the power we have and the way we use, abuse or ignore that power.
We are neither all powerful nor totally powerless. If we are looking for some touchstones on how we might think about power, the life a Jesus is a pretty good place to start.
Even before Jesus was born, his mother Mary was singing a song we call the Magnificat. She said that God had brought the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. We know the story about Jesus being born in a stable. Yet we also know the stories of how he used his power to help so many people that he encountered along the way.
A woman washing his feet with her tears and hair is elevated to honor. A tax collector is invited to take a step back serve Jesus dinner. His followers tell of how he calmed storms. And then, at his last meal with his closest followers, he washes their feet and tells them, “You call me Lord and Teacher…so if I, your Lord and Teacher have washed your feet, so you ought to wash one another’s feet.”
When we feel powerless, we need to seek allies. When we feel powerful, we need to embrace humility. When we misuse our power, we need to seek forgiveness.
And wherever we are, we need to remember that God’s grace is with us, Jesus’ life offers signposts and God’s Spirit will carry us along.
Like Joseph, like John Lewis, we have to struggle with the uses and abuses of power and we have to struggle with what it means to forgive and to be forgiven.
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