This is the last in our sermon series on stories from Genesis. We did not come close to talking about all the stories we could’ve talked about. We did not talk about Adam and Eve, or about the tower of Babel. We skipped right over Jacob. We talked about one aspect of Abraham’s life last week, but there was enough there that we could’ve done a whole sermon series just on him. The same thing applies to Joseph, who we’re going to talk about in a little bit.
I hope you’ve gotten a lot of out of this sermon series. I know I have. I hope it’s gotten us to really think about some of these stories we’ve heard ever since we were kids. I hope it’s gotten us to think about how God could do the things God does in Genesis and still be a loving, caring God.
What we’ve found, I think, is that God, in Genesis, is a loving, caring God. It’s just that God’s love and care does not always take the form we’d like it to take. Sometimes God’s love consists of warnings. Sometimes God’s love consists of tests. Sometimes God’s love consists of having to let us sink, to make sure we don’t harm others. In all of these things, though, God gives us second chances, if only we’ll turn to God to accept them.
Another thing we’ve tried to do in this sermon series is to think about how the people involved felt when they were going through the events described. Because these stories are familiar to some of us, we sometimes take for granted that there was a happy ending. There was, but the people who actually lived these stories did not know there was going to be a happy ending. They had to live these stories one day at a time, the way we all live our lives, and they did not know what the future held or what was going to happen next.
It seems like that’s especially true in the story of Joseph, which we read today. Joseph had a lot of things happen to him in his life. Some were terrible, and some were wonderful. He had times when he was on top of the world, when it looked like everything was going right and it always would. He also had times when he hit rock bottom, when he had no idea how or even if he was going to survive until tomorrow. Joseph had times when he was in control of everything around him, and times when he was in control of absolutely nothing. He experienced highs that were as high and lows that were as low as any human can experience.
In our first reading, Joseph’s brothers sold Joseph to be a slave in Egypt. Think about that. This was family, and family was a really big thing in ancient Israel. That’s why all those long lists of genealogies appear in the Old Testament. Joseph probably knew his brothers did not like him very much, but still, this kind of hatred had to have caught him completely by surprise.
Joseph had to have wondered what he’d done to deserve this. I certainly would. In fact, I have, in certain situations. You probably have, too. We all have those situations where we’re sitting around, minding our own business, and all at once it feels like the roof has fallen in on us. Maybe we can look back and see something we did that was not all that smart and contributed to it, but still, we don’t feel like we deserved all this. We wonder what in the world is going on.
Joseph did what most of us do in that situation, though. He tried to make the best of it. He was sold to a man named Potiphar, who was one of the officers of the Pharaoh, and so was a man of considerable wealth and influence. Joseph worked hard for Potiphar. He worked his way up the ranks of the slaves until he was put in charge of everything Potiphar had. He was still a slave, of course, but things were looking pretty good for Joseph. He must have thought his future looked pretty bright.
And just at that point, Joseph gets knocked down again. Not only was he not at fault in any way, he actually behaved better than many of us might have in the situation he was in. Potiphar’s wife tried several times to seduce him, and when he refused, she claimed that Joseph had attacked her and had him thrown in prison.
By this time, Joseph really had to wonder why all this was happening. Think about it. One of the worst things that could happen to someone had happened to him: he’d been sold into slavery. He’d stayed faithful to God, he’d made the best of it, and it looked like things were going to be all right after all. Then, he had something even worse happen to him. He was thrown into an Egyptian prison, and prison back then was nothing like what prison is now. Not only had he done nothing to deserve to be in prison, he was in prison specifically because he’d been faithful to God and had done what God wanted him to do. It probably seemed to Joseph like he’d have been better off if he’d ignored what God wanted and had gone ahead and slept with Potiphar’s wife like she’d wanted him to.
Again, I’ll bet a lot of us have been there. We get knocked down for no particular reason, we get back up, we start making progress, we think things are going to work out after all, and BOOM, we get knocked down even harder. It’s a hard thing to deal with. It’s even harder to deal with when we feel like we were doing everything we could do to follow God and do what God wanted us to do. We feel like we should get rewarded for that, and instead, it feels like we’re getting punished.
In the end, of course, it all works out for Joseph. He is called out of prison, interprets Pharaoh’s dream, and gets put in charge of everything in Egypt. He even reconciles with his brothers. He tells his brothers that, no matter how things may have seemed, God was working in all of this, and that things happened the way God wanted them to happen, no matter what they or anyone else may have intended.
Everyone likes a happy ending, of course. The thing is that, in telling the story, the Bible leaves out an awful lot. A lot of years passed during this story. Joseph was seventeen when he was sold into slavery. He was thirty when he was made the second-in-command to the Pharaoh. That means thirteen years went by. For all of those thirteen years he was a slave. Sometimes he was a respected slave with a lot of responsibility, but he was still a slave. For some of those years, he was in prison. We read this story and we see the happy ending, but Joseph did not know there was going to be a happy ending. He had no idea what was going to happen to him in the future. He had to live the story day by day, not knowing what was coming next.
Which, again, is the way we all live our lives. Each of our lives tells a story, in a sense. We hope the story will have a happy ending, but we don’t know if it will. Sometimes it seems like things are going well, but a lot of times it seems like they’re not. A lot of those times when they’re not, we have no idea why or what to do to change it. We have no idea what’s going to happen to us in the future. We have to live the story day by day, not knowing what’s coming next.
It can be really hard, sometimes, to stay faithful to God in the ups and downs of our lives. It can be really hard, sometimes, to keep trusting God when we have to live our stories one day at a time, not knowing what the future may hold for us. We want to believe in the happy ending, but we have no guarantee that it will come. We also have no guarantee that staying faithful to God will cause it to come, at least not in this world. Stephen stayed faithful to God and he was stoned to death. Paul stayed faithful to God and he died in a Roman prison. There are lots of other examples we could think of, too.
I think the point of the story of Joseph is not that staying faithful to God guarantees us a happy ending in this world. The point of the story of Joseph is that God asks us to be faithful in all circumstances, regardless of what’s happening now and regardless of what may happen in the future. God asks us to be faithful when we’re on top and we think things are going to be wonderful. God also asks us to be faithful when we’re on the bottom and we don’t see a way out no matter where we look. God asks us to be faithful in all the times in between, too.
We live our lives day by day, not knowing what’s coming next. Through all the ups and downs, though, there are things we do know. We know that God is there. We know that God loves us. We know that God has promised to be with us, and we know that God keeps God’s promises. If we can hold onto that as we go through our daily lives, God will help us handle the ups and downs, just like God helped Joseph handle them. We can do it. When we stay faithful, God does promise us a happy ending, if not in this world, then in the next one.
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