July 31, 2011
Genesis 37:1-4, 12-54
Pentecost 8
When God is Silent
The Rev. Dr. Leslie Kennard
We all like a story with a happy ending, and we all know, of course, that there is a happy ending to today’s story, even though it is not included in the verses we have heard. Our focus today is on the angst of a family in distress: Joseph, the youngest of Jacob’s 12 sons, was born into the daily strife of a family in which his father, Jacob, had two wives: Rachel, who was Jacob’s mother, and her sister, Leah. The sisters competed for the love of the husband they shared, and the boys, well, talk about sibling rivalry. Jacob was the obvious favorite, the family pet, and as the youngest child, he was forever the baby of the family, the golden child who could do no wrong, spoiled and fawned over and given a robe fit for royalty—a gift his brothers had never even dreamed of having. The stress in that family boiled over to the point where the brothers seriously plotted murdering Joseph. Instead they engaged in the horrible degradation of selling their baby brother into slavery for a mere 20 pieces of silver. And there was the delicious revenge they wrought against their father for his favoritism of the little twerp; the brothers soaked Joseph’s coat in goat’s blood and told their father that his favorite son was dead.
And we think OUR families are dysfunctional....
Now, we know God was able to use all this human treachery to repair and strengthen the relationship between God and all God’s children. We know that God gathers up all this human misery and tenderly blesses the entire family. We know that, in the end, Joseph, of all people, saves the whole family from famine, imprisonment, and death; that in the end, the family is reunited and—at least for a while—all is well. We also know that this is only a small part of the story of God’s ongoing, intimate, involved relationship with all creation.[i] So we have our happy ending (although we also know there’s more misery in a future that involves 400 years of slavery). But for Joseph and his family, all ends well.
The happy ending is NOT part of our scripture today. Today we are given only a snapshot of Joseph’s misery. In fact, in our story today, there is no mention of God’s presence, God’s involvement in Joseph’s life. This is a story of hatred, jealousy, violence, and greed. “Earlier in the book of Genesis, God was never hard to find,” but now, in Joseph’s time, “God has become silent.” [ii]
In this story, we read of a gang of brothers, and these brother are just as lethal as any inner city gang of our own time. This gang has tossed their own 17 year old baby brother—the one they are especially responsible for protecting—they toss him in an old cistern, a deep, dark, dried out pit. Joseph is left lying at the bottom, hungry, thirsty, alone. Afraid, abandoned, hopeless. The dark is absolute. There is no way he can climb out of the pit himself.
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At first blush, it feels as if we are mere observers. This is just a story. And as we look down at Joseph in the darkness of the pit all by himself—we are looking down at him from the safety of our position high above him on solid ground, almost 6,000 miles away and almost 4,000 years away. Joseph is there; we are here. We reassure ourselves, this is only a story.
But because the story is in the Bible, I believe the story of Joseph in the pit transcends time and space. Joseph’s story is, somehow, also our story. My story. Your story. Right here. Right now. We are all in one pit or another, wondering where on earth—not where in Heaven, but where on earth—is God?
Some of us are imprisoned in the pit of our ideas of how things used to be. We are certain that if only we could return to “the good old days” everything would be fine. If a loved one were still here; if we still had that job; if we hadn’t married that loser. We are tied down in the pit of our if-onlys, and unable to move forward.
Some of us are imprisoned in the pit of our certainty about how things ought to be. Parents ought to raise their children in the church. The rich ought to do more to help the poor. A sibling ought to do more to help us care for Mom or Dad. A husband ought to help more around the house. Children should respect their elders. Wives should obey their husbands. (Dream on, guys.)
Some of us are stuck in the pit of the Cinderella complex—our parents didn’t do any better at raising us than Jacob did with his kids. But we—we are going to be perfect parents. WE will be perfectly patient and perfectly loving. WE will raise perfect children. Now we are willing to overlook their somewhat less than perfect behavior as they learn how to be perfect. But then the teen years strike and we are tossed into the pit by our perfect children.
Some of us have been tossed into the pit by the expectations of others—a parent for whom we can’t ever seem to get it right no matter how hard we try, a boss who seems determined to undermine us.
What about the pit of failed health: diabetes, cancer, MS, arthritis. The pit of grief. The pit of poverty. The pit of drug addiction or alcohol abuse. The pit of child abuse.
Joseph has a lot of company down here in the pit, doesn’t he? And WHERE, we ask, where is God? God spoke to Noah. God spoke to Abraham. But Joseph hears no word from the LORD. Only the whistling of the desert wind over the top of the cistern, only the babbling of his own thoughts: “This doesn’t make sense.” “Here I am; I did what my father asked and look where it got me.” And the complaint that we all whine at one time or another: “It’s not FAIR!”
Time passed. Time and more time. And still God did not speak. God did not intervene. Joseph had no way of knowing that God might be using his sorry plight to save the whole world. [One thing this story tells us is that God’s silence is in NO WAY an indication that God is not active and involved in our lives. How often we judge God’s presence and activity based on how good our circumstances are. But that’s another sermon.]
The story of Joseph is a story of a man who became powerful and forgiving and generous—NOT because of his dreadful suffering, NOT because of his amazing will-power, not because of anything that Joseph himself did. In the end, Joseph became the hero of the story because of who GOD is, because of what GOD was doing behind the scenes. When we are in the pits, it is easy to believe that because God is silent, God is sleeping. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Jim Twamley reflects that “When you are down to nothing, God is up to something.” Mothers of young children know what he means, especially during these long summer days when the kids are home all the time. We are moving through the day, doing what needs to be done—laundry, cooking, whatever—and suddenly we stop to listen. We listen very carefully. And if we can’t hear anything, we drop everything. Why? Yes—because the kids are up to something! When we can’t hear God, it’s because God is up to something.
The wonderful theologian Walter Bruggeman says, There is a “hidden, inscrutable...dimension of our life,... an arena in which the purposes of God [are] at work among us in ways we do not even recognize.” (No surprise there—Who would expect Joseph to recognize that God was busy getting him out of there? If we were the ones at the bottom of the cistern, would we perk up and think, O, goody! God is up to something WONDERFUL!) God is like the stage manager who orchestrates the lights and the special effects—invisible, silent, and very busy. “This hiddenness must be honored and taken seriously, because it is a way in which God does for us more than we can do for ourselves....God is a genuine power in our lives.” [iii]
If Joseph’s life had been only his own private life, if he had been able to work out his loves and hates and fears by himself, he would have been justified in killing his brothers to get even. I mean it was 11 against one! Killing them—now THAT would have been fair. But Joseph trusts that there is a “hidden, inscrutable, unresolved purpose for his life that is beyond his control.” [iv]
WE remember what Joseph couldn’t have imagined while he lay cold and helpless and alone at the bottom of the pit. We know the end of the story; during a horrendous famine, Joseph embraces and welcomes his father and brothers in love, and saves them from starving. “He is willing to break the vicious cycle and act in kindness toward his brothers...because he is willing to trust a purpose for his life that is larger than his own horizon.” (p.12)
In his book, The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren tells his readers how to find the purpose God has for their lives. But—except for Jesus and the prophets—most of the people in the Bible have no clue what their purpose is. The best we can do is believe, as Joseph did, that our lives are larger than we can imagine. God’s silent call to us when we are alone at the bottom of the well is to embrace the largeness that is God’s gift for our lives. We are called to live and to act as though the purposes of God really do make a difference in our lives.
Just because God is silent, just because we are unable to see—or even imagine—what God is doing doesn’t mean God has left us alone, left us on our own to take things into our own hands. Always and forever, even when God’s silence is deafening, we are held and cared for and guided by the generous, merciful, giving and forgiving God. God of might. God of mystery. God of meaning. God of magnificent unimaginable purposes.
AMEN