Rev Dee Shaffer
Sunday, February 23, 2025
In this scripture, Jesus sets out a path for us to live as we were created to live.
And it is a path that is supposed to give us a life that would be of peace and a life of joy.
And in this reading, there are such gems as love your enemies, and do good to those who hate you, and bless those who curse you, and pray for those who abuse you, are some of the gems within this reading.
This is not an easy thing to do. So is this reading could be interpreted as if I force myself to do these things, if I just force myself and bring it forth, that’s going to bring me peace and joy.
Is that how we read this? And, I say, actually, this is a list of outcomes, a list of things that we will be able to do as a result of something.
So where do we find within us the wherewithal to actually live as Jesus calls us to do in this reading.
Well, there’s this man who lived into this reading and to this teaching that can maybe help us, because all of us surely wants to get to that peace and joy.
So let’s see how we can get there. And the story is found in Genesis back there in the reading of Joseph.
This is a rich narrative that has been pulled from all over the place and put together into 14 chapters in Genesis.
So it’s a beautiful 14 chapters. I highly recommend you read those 14 chapters talking about Joseph.
And it gives us an early idea of what the ancient theologians saw as the way to achieve peace and joy in their lives of the common people.
But you have to know something about Joseph. He did not start out in peace and joy.
No, he spent his youth centered on himself. He was the favorite son. He was pampered.
He was spoiled. He was a tattletale. He was just a wreck of a kid.
And he never thought of his brothers or how his behavior hurt them. Never even occurred to him.
And then there were these dreams. He had these dreams all the time. And Joseph never kept his dreams to himself.
He always let his brothers know what he had dreamed. And the last straw was when he came to them and said he had this dream.
And the dream was that someday they will all kneel down in homage to him.
Oh, that was it. They could take it no more. They had had enough. And so soon after that, they found a chance to get rid of him.
And they were out in the desert, out in a desert place, all alone, just the brothers and him.
And so, they decided what they would do is they threw him into an empty well.
And they left him there and starved to death. And while in that empty well, Joseph came to himself.
If you recognize that line, it comes from the Chronicle of Simon. When he’s a Jewish kid, he’s standing with absolutely nothing left to live for, and he’s standing knee-deep in pig poop.
And it says he came to himself. Well, that’s what happens to Joseph now. In Corinthians, it says about being a seed, you must be thrown into the ground in order to be born again.
And here Joseph is thrown into a deep, dark well to be born again. In Southern Evangelical terms, it would be said that he had a come-to-Jesus moment.
That’s what we would call it. He came to himself. And in that blackness of the well and the bleak prospects of living much longer at all, his eyes were opened, and he saw himself as God saw him.
He had that moment. And it says he came to himself. He became who he was created to be.
Joseph sees how he’s been and realizes he’s not been who he needs to be and who he wants to be.
He wants to make that change. And I don’t know about you in your life, but I’ve had several of those moments when I was in a career advertising in Manhattan, and I realized this is not who I want to be.
This is not how I want to live. These are beautiful moments. So even after his brothers decide, well, we can’t really kill him, so let’s pull him out.
So they bring him out of the darkness, back out onto the ground. And they sell him to traveling merchants who drag him across the desert and then sell him to slavery in Egypt.
Still, he is changed. He is not the same as when he went in. There is no sign that he ever felt sorry for himself.
No sign, but instead, somehow, he was grateful because he was still alive. Joseph is bought by an Egyptian army officer who takes him to his home to be a slave.
And he approaches his life as a house slave with absolute gratitude because in Egypt there are so much worse things that the slaves were asked to do.
So, every job he did, he did intentionally as if it was a gift he was giving to God.
And the master of the house sees that he is doing it this way, so he starts adding more and more and more work onto him until he’s head of the entire household.
So things are looking up. He’ll live happily ever after because he’s following God and doing everything right, right.
He’s living just as he should. Never forget that the Bible is full of ordinary people, ordinary people who find themselves in situations just like us that they do not want to get themselves into.
But also he understood that God did not cause this to happen. And in case you haven’t figured it out yet in your lifetime, life changes on a dime.
Life just does that. The story goes that his master’s wife would like to take him into her bed, and he will not do that.
And so she claims he rapes her, I guess out of embarrassment or something like that.
Remember, slaves have no power, and so he finds himself in a dungeon for the rest of his life.
He was doing everything right, and now he’s in a dungeon for the rest of his life.
We say as observers, he’d have every right to be angry. He’d have every right to be bitter.
Life wasn’t fair. Another thing, life isn’t fair. But Joseph now in a dungeon and no hope of ever getting out.
Somehow he doesn’t hate those who put him there. Somehow he doesn’t feel sorry for himself.
Somehow he understands that God did not cause this to happen, and he chooses, and this could not have been easy, but he intentionally chooses not to spend the rest of his precious life on this earth bitter and angry.
It takes intentionality. Instead, he looked at how he and God could use this granted horrible situation for good.
And he turns the focus off himself and starts helping those in the dungeon with him, and as he does, he becomes even closer to God, and he starts having dreams again.
He starts dreaming. And through these dreams, this lowly prisoner comes to the attention of the pharaoh, the king of Egypt, because the king has dreams also, but can’t understand what they mean, except the pharaoh knows something bad is going to happen.
So somehow or another, Joseph, through a series of things, Joseph gets together with the pharaoh and is able to interpret the dreams.
And not only does he understand the dreams, but he also comes up with a plan on how to take care of the people of Egypt during the time of famine that was about to come.
The same entire nation who made him into a slave, the same entire nation who absolutely hates the promised land and the people of the promised land, he has a plan to save them.
To save them, because that’s who he is. That’s what it is. And so in our story, we come to Genesis, our story that we read today from Genesis.
And he meets his brothers, because now he is number two in the country of Egypt.
And he meets his brothers, and they bow down to him, because they don’t recognize him.
They bow down to him and hug, begging for food. Oh, boy. Think about that.
They put him into that well to starve him to death. And now they stand before him, starving to death.
What revenge he could have had. Just think of what he could do. But that is not Joseph’s heart.
When he came to himself in that dry well, he was able to see and look at the situations of his life, not as a victim and not as, God, why did you do this to me.
But instead as, okay, this is my reality now. What can I do to not make this a living hell that I am in?
Like Joseph, all of us, all of us have a choice as to whether life events will destroy us or whether, with the help of God, can evolve us into something better.
Are you familiar with the writer Elie Wiesel. I don’t know if you remember. He was going to be a certain age.
He was very popular with those of us of a certain age. Anyway, he wrote 57 books.
And he was also a Nobel laureate and a Holocaust survivor. And he studied the story of Joseph.
And in his deep down dive that he had with Joseph, he found something that he had never seen before, and it changed his life.
So this one story stuck with him more than any of the others. And until he heard this story, he looked at his life through the eyes of a boy who had seen just too much, just too much in the prison camp.
He saw his mother and his sister murdered, and he did not have a good time while he was there, obviously.
And he approached life as he grew up, trying to stay as detached as he could so nothing could ever hurt him in the heart again.
A lot of people are like that, just to stay detached. And he saw his future as bitter, and he was in deep anger.
And I don’t think any of us can blame him for having that reaction to his job.
That would be a normal outcome. But in his deep dive into the material on Joseph that got left out of the Bible, he found a story that just changed his life.
See, the Bible does tell us that Joseph moved his entire family, as we read today, over to Egypt and took care of them all during the famine.
They were safe. But his father’s wish was that when he died, he would be taken back to the Promised Land and buried there.
So the story takes place when Joseph and his whole family, all his brothers in his whole family, are taking their father, who had just died, back to the Promised Land to bury him.
And on the way back, Joseph makes a detour and stops at the empty well where they had thrown him so many years ago.
And for a long time, he just stands there and stares into the empty well.
And his brothers assume he’s thinking about, you know, what they had done to him.
That didn’t enter his mind at all. It is written that he stares into the well as a place of his transformation, of the beginning of his life.
That’s what he was staring at, where his life, so rich in tremendous ups and tremendous downs, began.
He wanted to remember his past and stand in a moment with gratitude to his brothers for having thrown him there in the first place.
And he stood there in gratitude to God for walking alongside him in all the challenges that came after that.
Listen to this wisdom. Joseph is thankful for every single thing that happened to him because it made him who he was.
It made him into who he was. Is this the secret. Is this the key to enable us to move closer to a life of peace and joy.
Is this it. If we stand in gratitude to what’s happened behind us, everything that’s happened behind us, and see what is before us through the eyes of gratitude of what’s coming ahead, and then maybe loving our enemies and neighbors, doing good to those who hate you, blessing those who curse you, praying for those who abuse you, it becomes easier because if it were not for them, we would not be who we are today.
That’s a really big bar that we are challenged to raise ourselves to by Jesus in this gospel.
But if we prize the opportunity to have peace and to have joy, and if we are never alone because God just jumps right into those situations with us, then I’m thinking that we should all give it a big try.
Do I hear an Amen?
