Rebecca Sheridan
September 23, 2018
Genesis 39:1-23

One of my more vivid childhood memories is from my first week of kindergarten. I loved going to school! We were gathered around our teacher to read a book during snacktime, sitting criss-cross-applesauce on the floor. We were eating graham crackers, listening to the story, when the girl sitting next to me for whatever reason grabbed my graham cracker and started eating it. “Hey!” I said. “That’s mine!” “Rebecca, please listen to the story,” my teacher said gently. I was frustrated but tried to keep quiet and forget about my graham cracker. But then, for whatever reason, this same girl took my hand and bit it! “Ow!” I screamed. The next thing I knew, I was in time out. I still remember the other girl sticking her tongue out at me while I sat in the corner, with graham cracker still on it. I was crushed. My dad said I came home that day and said sadly, “Today wasn’t a good day. I learned that some people don’t follow the rules.”
I’m sure many of you have a story similar to that – a time when you experienced a personal injustice and learned the hard lesson that some people don’t follow the rules, that life is not always fair. Joseph is someone from the Bible who definitely learned that life wasn’t fair, throughout his life, yet it all worked out pretty well in the end. Our story from Genesis this morning is like a soap opera or this week’s headlines in the news! But we can identify with Joseph in his struggle to do what is right and “follow the rules,” only to be punished anyway. The episode with Potiphar’s wife that we heard today was not the first time that Joseph suffered an injustice, either.
Joseph was the youngest brother, the only son of his dad’s favorite wife Rachel, until Benjamin was born later. Joseph’s dad Jacob gave Joseph a beautiful coat of many colors because he was his favorite. As you can also imagine, Joseph’s other brothers didn’t think this was very fair at all. So, they decided to sell him into slavery, where he ended up as the slave to Potiphar and his wife in Egypt. Here Joseph finds himself in prison, wrongfully imprisoned, sold into slavery, living in a foreign land. Joseph knows well life isn’t fair. Yet God looks out for Joseph amid all this injustice. The end of our reading tells us that, “there in jail God was still with Joseph: He reached out in kindness to him; he put him on good terms with the head jailer. The head jailer put Joseph in charge of all the prisoners – he ended up managing the whole operation. The head jailer gave Joseph free rein, never even checked on him, because God was with him; whatever he did God made sure it worked out for the best.” Could it be possible that God is working things out for the best for us in our lives, too?
Here’s how it works out for Joseph: he ends up becoming the pharaoh’s right hand man after interpreting the pharaoh’s dreams and saving Egypt from famine. He’s a free man and more than that – wealthy, powerful, and able to in the end save his brothers who rejected him from starvation. Joseph’s story is a wonderful story about redemption, forgiveness, and God’s restoration of justice. Toward the end of his story in Genesis 50:20, Joseph tells his brothers, “You planned evil against me but God used those same plans for my good.” Joseph’s personal story is a powerful reminder for us to trust God is at work, never leaving us, using whatever evil may be happening to us for good.
Certainly at times, it can be hard to see how God uses evil for good, or that our situations could possibly ever get better. Similar to Abraham and Sarah’s story that we heard last week, we can be reassured that there are other people in scripture who go through terrible things and yet come through those events with faith in God’s goodness. If we look at the injustice of false imprisonment alone, Jeremiah, Daniel, Peter, Paul, and Silas are just a few people falsely imprisoned in the Bible, oh, and by the way, Jesus, too, right? Yet God certainly uses these people for good, in prison and out.
When we think about our own experience with personal injustice, we can ask God to help us be as forgiving, as trusting and as resilient as Joseph. But it was hard for me to read Joseph’s story this week and not also think about contemporary societal injustices taking place in the world today that are eerily like the situations Joseph finds himself in. Human trafficking, our modern-day slavery, where still people sell even family members in our own state of Nebraska. The #MeToo movement as our country wrestles with cases of sexual harassment and how men and women can trust one another in sexual relationships. Much like Joseph and Potiphar, we see political corruption and selfish motivations at work that lead us to wonder who’s actually telling the truth. And still today, false imprisonment is a huge problem in our country. We imprison the highest percentage of our citizens than in any other country. In fact, I learned that we house 25% of the world’s prisoners even though the United States makes up just 5% of the world’s population. I don’t think that’s because we have that many more lawbreakers than everyone else.
When societal issues of injustice confront us, as they do pretty much in the news every day, our faith is our guide. As free, white, middle-class Americans, we have to confess that we are not like Joseph because we are not foreign slaves. We have power and privilege to do something, to say something to prevent an injustice. Today’s reading also causes us to ask who the Josephs are in front of us, in our communities, that we may overlook or not even notice, suffering injustices like Joseph today. Perhaps God is wanting to use us like the jailer, like the Pharaoh, to lift others out of unfair oppressive systems, to combat evil with good. I know, too, that often what’s not right in the world can seem so overwhelmingly complex and frustrating that it’s easy to do nothing and retreat. But one of those baptismal promises we make again at our confirmations is to strive for justice and peace in all of the Earth, and I know that God uses people like us to do the good he wants done in the world! God takes one of the most vulnerable in Egyptian society, a Hebrew slave, the baby brother, and uses him, Joseph, to save all of Egypt and more from famine. God uses one of the most vulnerable in Bethlehem, an illegitimate baby born to peasant parents in a stable, to save the world in Jesus the Christ. In the face of so many injustices and evil today, it can be hard sometimes to trust and believe that God will use us for good. We see God’s endgame in Jesus, the savior of the world, who calls us still today to reconcile all people back to himself: men and women, rich and poor, slave and free, accuser and accused. This is the story of Joseph and his brothers: the one who was sold into slavery and assumed dead doesn’t take revenge but reverses the evil done to him by saving the very ones he was hurt by. In the face of injustice today, God can use us for good, too.
Amen.