Proper 15

If you’ve ever gone on a cruise, you’ve been through a certain obligatory exercise known as “the lifeboat drill.” It usually happens on the first day. Before you’ve even learned your way around the ship, you receive instructions to go to a certain designated location on deck. There, you join a select group of a dozen or more passengers, along with several members of the crew. Those crew members may be waiters, cleaners, clerks or even casino dealers, but for these few brief moments, they’re all sailors.

In the event of a dire emergency, they’ve been trained to escort your little group over the rail and into a lifeboat, which, for the moment, is hanging ominously overhead.

It’s a bit of a downer, to be honest. There you are, all ready to begin your vacation afloat, when you’re solemnly reminded that — in certain highly unlikely circumstances — the ship you’re standing on may no longer be afloat.

There’s something else they teach you to do during the lifeboat drill: put on a life preserver. There you stand with your fellow holidaymakers with this puffy vest around your neck. Your friendly crew members teach you to cinch it tight across your chest. They point out that it has a whistle and a battery-powered light. There’s nervous laughter — and a bad Titanic joke or two — before the bellow of the ship’s horn signals the end of the drill. You happily hand over your life preserver and try to think about anything but the ship going down.

And when it inevitably pops back into your mind, it’s no small comfort to know a life preserver is waiting for you at your designated muster zone.

            Today’s lesson from Genesis is about a life preserver of a different sort. This life preserver never got anywhere near the briny deep. It has a name: Joseph. This biblical character declares to his 11 brothers, in Genesis 45, “God sent me before you to preserve life.”

These words Joseph speaks are among the most extraordinary in all of Scripture — because they’re terrifically difficult for him to say. In a single day, Joseph travels from death to life, and becomes a life preserver for his brothers.

There are a number of Josephs in the Bible, but only two of them can be called leading characters: Joseph the earthly father of Jesus, and this Joseph, son of Jacob. This Joseph is one of 12 sons Jacob had by four different women. Jacob was married to Leah and Rachel simultaneously. Zilpah and Bilhah were concubines or slaves of Jacob’s two wives.

According to the custom of the day, it was acceptable for a wealthy tribal chieftain like Jacob to have more than one wife, and to use his wives’ servants, if need be, as surrogate wives — just in case there weren’t enough children already. This resulted in one big, not-so-happy family.

If you know anything about families today — especially step-families — you know how incredibly complicated relationships within the family can become. These complexities are multiplied exponentially in a patriarchal, polygamous family like Jacob’s clan.

Among his two wives and at least two concubines, Jacob has a favorite, the one called Rachel. Among his 12 sons and an unspecified number of daughters, Jacob also has a favorite: Joseph. Not so coincidentally, Joseph is a son by his favorite wife, Rachel.

Most any Sunday school child can tell you about Joseph and his coat of many colors, and how his 11 brothers get sick and tired of their father’s favoritism. When Jacob sends Joseph out one day to check on whether they’re doing a good job as shepherds, his brothers’ resentment boils over. They decide to beat some humility into him. But things rapidly escalate out of control — as they so often do when mob rule takes over. Before his brothers realize what they’re doing, they’ve thrown Joseph into a pit and sold him to some passing slave traders. As a cover-up, the 11 brothers dredge Joseph’s coat through some animal blood and take it back to their heartbroken father as proof that wild beasts have killed his favorite son. How’s that for a dysfunctional family?

Fast-forward, now, a decade or two. Joseph is, by now, only a memory to the family he unwillingly left behind. Everyone assumes he died long ago, both those who believe the wild-animal yarn and those who know the truth.

A terrible famine has come upon the land. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so Jacob sends his sons packing off to Egypt in a last-ditch attempt to broker a grain deal with the Pharaoh’s chief of staff.

Little do they know that this high-and-mighty Egyptian official, Pharaoh’s number-one advisor, is none other than their brother Joseph. Against all odds, he has survived.

More than merely surviving, he has prospered. Through an incredibly unlikely series of events, he has gone from slave to dream-therapist to butler to prime minister. Joseph had plenty of time over those long years to brood over what he might do to his lousy, back-stabbing brothers if ever he got the chance. And now — quite unexpectedly — that day has come. Joseph finds himself face-to-face with all 11 of them. They’re on their knees, prostrating themselves before him, and he has all the absolute power of an oriental potentate in his hands.

When he speaks, his voice is barely a whisper. “I am Joseph,” he says. “Is my father still alive?” Can you blame the 11 for being speechless?

The next words Joseph speaks are gentle and full of compassion. And that’s what brings him to that remarkable line, “God sent me before you to preserve life.”

After all those years of licking emotional wounds and dreaming of revenge, Joseph has caught a higher vision: the preservation of life. What’s of paramount importance, he now sees, is life, and not mere human life itself — for life is cheap in Pharaoh’s Egypt — but the life of God’s chosen people. Joseph now realizes that his life’s vocation — quite apart from all he has done for Pharaoh and for Egypt — is to preserve God’s covenant, to be the living instrument by which the promise is passed on to the next generation.

And so, standing there on the mosaic floor of the royal palace — which no one in Egypt would be surprised to see run red with his faithless brothers’ blood — Joseph instead pronounces absolution. He all but commands his brothers to lay aside their guilt, and to cherish instead their precious family tie. His carefully nurtured anger has suddenly left him. Blood, he has come to learn, is thicker than bile.

This story from the Hebrew Scriptures — with Joseph’s troubling words about preserving life — is about the last thing we expect, isn’t it?

The way of the world is often the way of revenge. A few years ago, a man named Mark Bao had his laptop stolen. Fortunately, Bao had a software program on his laptop that allowed him to access it remotely. To his surprise, he discovered that the thief had used the laptop to record a video of himself practicing various dance moves. And this thief was a really horrible dancer.

So Bao uploaded the dancing thief video to YouTube with the title “Don’t steal computers from people who know how to use computers.” The embarrassed thief returned the laptop and begged Bao to take the video down, but he refused. 

Joseph demonstrates a higher way, the way of forgiveness. Forgiving others — especially when the wound is deep — is one of the most difficult things any of us will ever be called upon to do. Yet few tasks are more important, not only for the person being forgiven, but also for the person doing the forgiving.

A wise person has said, “Forgiveness is when you set a prisoner free — and then you realize the prisoner is yourself.”

Forgiveness is not easy. It goes against the “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” ethic that’s so prevalent in this world, even 20 centuries after Jesus himself renounced it. Forgiveness like this may seem, to some, pitifully weak and soft on justice — but in reality, nothing could be stronger nor more determined. True forgiveness does not condone the wrong that has been done, nor does it forget. Forgiveness freely and openly acknowledges past offenses, but then it moves on, seeking always to preserve and enhance life.

“Only the brave know how to forgive,” writes the 18th-century preacher and novelist Laurence Sterne. “A coward never forgives; it is not in his nature.”

What burden of anger or resentment are you carrying around today? How long have you nurtured it, even cherished it? Maybe it’s time to let that anger go — for, very likely, it’s causing you more pain and anguish than anyone else.

Remember the conclusion of the famous prayer of Francis of Assisi: “For it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”