June 12, 2016
Joseph | Genesis 39
- Genesis 39:1-23
- Rev. Dr. Jerry Deck
Every time I put on the uniform I felt it. The thick khaki pants with stains of chocolate and ketchup on them. The green and burnt orange buttoned down shirt that seemed to come straight from the 70s and always smelled like old grease, no matter how many times I washed it (which honestly was probably not that many times). The forest green half-apron that I would wrap around my back and then back to the front and tie. I felt it when I walked in through the back and inserted my timecard into the clock. But I especially felt it when I would walk out on the floor of the Shoney’s where I worked and went over to wait on a college student that I knew. They’d look at me and say, “Didn’t you graduate already?!” “I didn’t expect to see you here.” I’d stammer and say something about how I was just wanting to hang out for a year with my friends or how I needed to find myself or how much I loved replenishing French toast sticks at the breakfast bar, but each time I knew that the real reason I was there was because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I was always the one who was doing his best to excel, who believed the future was incredibly bright, who was convinced that I was going to succeed and so each graduate school letter I had received that previous spring that said, “You have not been accepted,” cast me deeper and deeper into confusion and wonderment as to what had happened to the dream, if you will. And every time, every time I put on that uniform I was reminded of it and I wondered what, if anything, was going to come next.
Now I realize that this pales in comparison to what we see going on in Joseph, or to perhaps what many of you have experienced, and yet the type of feeling is the same: the feeling of thinking that there was supposed to be something more, that this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Maybe it’s a job that didn’t pan out or a relationship that never happened (or didn’t end up as you had hoped) or children that you dreamt of having or a vision that you were certain was from God and yet no fruit has been produced. It could be a lot of things, but the feeling of bewilderment and questions and disappointment is the same. If you have been there, or are there now, you know the temptations that are ever present-to give up or to walk away. It’s one of the reasons why the Joseph story is so powerful because it speaks clearly into situations that most of us understand.
And as we hear the story of Joseph, much as I said last week, we don’t always know exactly what he is thinking. Is he struggling with believing, is he wrestling with God or is he convinced that the dream is not yet dead, that God is still with him? He does actually say something this week, which is helpful, but we still can’t get inside of his head. Yet, it seems to me that the more you watch him, the more you can’t help but become increasingly convinced that he has not given up on God, that the dreams he had so long ago are still at the forefront of his mind. It isn’t explicit perhaps, but if we watch him closely, I think we see that while he may not yet know how it’s going to happen, and while it may not happen exactly as he had pictured it long ago, that God is still there and is still at work. The vision, the mission, is not dead.
The 39th chapter begins with the reminder that Joseph had been sold to Potiphar, who is the Phaoroh’s captain of the guard, and it appears that things are going well for Joseph. The Lord is blessing what he does and interestingly, we are told that Potiphar saw that the Lord was with him. Not only that, but because Potiphar saw that the Lord was with him he trusted him with everything except his food, which is probably a food purity issue. (As a quick aside, this a remarkable picture of what a witness we can be by the way in which we live out our faith. That even someone of a different faith and place can both see God in your life and can then build a trusting relationship with you because of how you are living your life. In our own time of tension and mistrust, how might we live so that others, while perhaps not agreeing with us, cannot help but see God in our lives and be willing to come alongside of us and trust us because of that.)
In a comment that seemingly comes out of nowhere we are told that Joseph was handsome and good looking. He was quite the looker, in other words. And Potiphar’s wife, it seems, could not stop looking at him and asking him to “lie with her.” But Joseph refuses and what’s great about his refusal is that he doesn’t simply make this an issue of saying no to an adulterous affair. This is not a “Well, God doesn’t want me to have fun or experience pleasure, so I can’t.” No, in a glimpse to his maturity he sees it as an assault on his relationships with Potiphar and with God. “Potiphar’s entrusted me with everything but you and how could I do this against him?” Not only that, he goes on to say, but how could I do this against God? Even in these moments he is able to look past himself and see how his actions would affect his relationships with God and with others. It’s a remarkably mature and faithful remark.
But Potiphar’s wife did not give up. Day after day, we are told, she approached him until finally she was with him alone in the house. This time she was not as easily rebuffed as she grabbed his garment and he fled outside. While I won’t delve into this too deeply I think it’s interesting to point out there are some scholars who believe that the way in which the Hebrew is written alludes to ambiguity in Joseph. In other words, that he was wrestling with this decision emotionally. It may be nothing, of course, but it also may be a way of showing that for Joseph, as for most of us, it was a struggle for him to remain faithful to God in the midst of this difficult time. But flee he does, however, yet again he is without his outer garment. For the second time in his life a coat leads to his struggles.
When Potiphar arrives home his wife accuses Joseph of attempting to insult her and her dignity. A bit like Joseph’s brothers did to their father Jacob when they said “Is this your son’s coat?” she says to her husband, “The Hebrew servant, whom you have brought among us…” Not surprisingly, Potiphar is none too pleased to hear this and so he quickly throws Joseph into prison. Now, his punishment could have been much worse, including being killed, and so perhaps the fact that he was merely thrown into the King’s prison is a hint that Potiphar may not have been completely convinced that Joseph was guilty. One way or the other though, Joseph is confronted with another obstacle. Yet again we are told that the Lord is with Joseph and the chief jailer it seems (just like Potiphar), sees that and so again Joseph was put in charge of the place where he found himself, which brings us to the conclusion of the 39th chapter.
So, what gives us a glimpse into the fact that Joseph had not given up on the dream that he believed God had given to him? I think one of the ways we see this is that Joseph does not give in to the temptation of distractions that were around him including, of course, Potiphar’s wife. And why? Well, I think this suggests that he had such a clear picture of where he still believed he was going (aka the mission that God had given him) that he didn’t allow himself to live in a moment that would have hindered him from reaching that goal. He had a larger picture of God’s mission which helped him to avoid being distracted, no matter how attractive those distractions may have been. As Walter Brueggemann puts it, he has a “sense of destiny, a destiny not to be squandered on a fling of passion.” Joseph understands that he is a part of something larger and because of that he refused to be distracted by other temptations.
It leaves us with the simple question of whether or not our mission is strong enough to keep us from temptations and distractions that are all around us? Research has shown how high school students who have a clear sense of mission and of where they are going are much less likely to give into short-term temptations that can easily derail their future. Or to take an example straight from this story, it is easy to see how easily lust of the flesh can take over if we don’t have a clear sense of the mission of our married life. Or when we talked about how we spend our time a few weeks ago we were really asking the question of whether or not you have a clear sense of God’s mission, because if you don’t then you will end up spending your time on the many temptations and distractions that beckon us, not just once, but each and every day.
It’s also a part of the reason why we as a church talk about our mission statement with some regularity. We are called together by God to make disciples and release them for service in our broken world. Why do we repeat that? Because the truth is there are lots of easy distractions for us to be tempted by, not necessarily even bad or evil distractions, but things which can easily sidetrack us from the most important things God has given us to do in order to fulfill our mission. It’s easy for us to get bogged down by the day-to-day and so we need to continually be reminded of the fact that this is about a larger mission that God has given to us and the more we readily keep that in mind, the more likely we are to stay on track and to be able to ignore that which threatens to detour us. Is your mission, is our mission, strong enough to keep us from the temptations and distractions that surround us?
The second thing we see in Joseph’s life that I think reveals his clear faith and trust that God is not done with him is the way in which he remains faithful and at work right…where…he…is. It’s easy for most of us, who know how the story ends, to overlook just how difficult it must have been to remain faithful each and every day and to continue the belief that God was with him, when he had no idea what the outcome was going to be. In those first days as he’s scrubbing the toilet, surely he must have remembered that rather than having others bow to him, he was bowing to the porcelain throne, so to speak. But, rather than just doing a half-hearted job out of his pain or anger and asking why God hasn’t given him what he thought he would, he seems to have scrubbed it in such a way that they couldn’t help but notice that something was different about him. Instead of picking up after the animals with vim and vigor or laboring under the heat of the sun with endurance and energy he could easily have said, “Well, I’ll work hard once I get to where I know God is going to take me.” While he could have sat in the jail and talked endlessly about how unfair it all was and just dragged his cup back and forth across the bars, he decided to do the work he was called to do, not in 10 years when he was where he wanted to be or where he thought God was going to take him, but right then.
And we have to remember that this was an every day decision. Much like the temptation of Potiphar’s wife that came every day, so too were the temptations of Joseph to give up each day, to give into the disappointment each day, to figure God must have forgotten him each day. But each day he worked in such a way, right where he was, that it revealed to others that God was with him and it reveals to us that Joseph was someone who had not forgotten that God had called him.
It is so easy for most of us to give up or to think about what we’ll do at some point in the future when things are going better or (though we might not say it out loud) to think that we’ll be faithful to God when it’s clear he’s being faithful to us. But the question that this part of the Joseph story forces us to ask is whether we are trying to be faithful right now and right where we are? Not tomorrow or next year or when things are looking up, but what even small things might we do today to be faithful to God in our families, in our neighborhoods, at our jobs? There are always reasons, and good ones quite frankly, to wait to engage in acts that glorify God. The question is whether or not we have the faith, like Joseph, to begin glorifying him today, whether or not we feel like it and whether or not we are experiencing the presence of God.
One of the advantages that Joseph had, as strange as it may sound, is that he was thrown in jail where my guess is, at least for a while he had time to sit and think and reflect. It was the perfect opportunity to ask how he was reacting to the situation in which he found himself, to ask how God might be calling him to be faithful right then-not when the disappointment was over, but in the midst of that disappointment. Not waiting around for the perfect situation to avail itself, but to be faithful in that moment. As I thought about that I realized that in some sense this morning may be jail time for you. I don’t mean it feels like jail, although it might (!), but that it is the one time you may have this week to stop and to ask God this question. If nothing changed in your life, how might you be faithful right where you are? And so, like the cell door closing behind you, I’d like for you to take a couple of minutes and ask yourself that question- perhaps even write something down.
*****
The story of Joseph is a good and challenging one because it meets us, many of us at least, right where we are. It’s a “salt of the earth” kind of story that says “Okay, so you’re in this situation, now what?” In those times when things don’t go the way you wanted them to, now what? In those times when you feel like God has disappointed you, now what? In those times when you feel like you’ll wait until your life turns around, now what? The now what is to remember the mission that God has given you and to remember that you are a part of the beautiful story of God’s kingdom. The now what is to choose to be faithful today, this very day. The now what is to remember that just as God has worked in the past, so too is God working now and will continue to work into the future. Much as we lived in the “meanwhile” of God last week, today and every day may we live in the “now what” that God might reveal himself to us in ways we may not have experienced if we had given up or given in. May it be so. Amen.