Tuesday, August 22, 2017
Sermon: Seeing Beyond Pain
Genesis 45:1-15
Last week we read about how Joseph was sold into slavery by his jealous
brothers. Much has happened in Joseph’s life since that time: his life has had
highs and lows, he has been in positions of respect, and he has been falsely
accused and thrown in prison. So in this week’s reading, Joseph is a powerful
leader in Egypt in charge of the distribution of food during a severe famine. With
great irony, Joseph’s brothers come to the distribution center for food.
If you were the writer of a revenge novel, the set-up is perfect. Karma is
about to strike with a red hot iron. They sold Joseph into slavery and now,
Joseph will reject their application for food and let them starve! Hahahaha!
But that isn’t what happens. Although Joseph could hold their wrongful
treatment against them, although he could throw their past at them and deny
them food, he does not. At first it looks like he might seek revenge. Just
before the section that was read, Joseph is clearly struggling with how to
receive them. At first he plants a cup from the palace in their food and then
charges them with stealing it, and at that point the reader is wondering if
Joseph will have them thrown in prison on these false charges.
But he doesn’t, instead he tells them that they must go back and bring their
youngest brother, Benjamin with them. (Apparently he is concerned that they
have treated Benjamin the same way they treated him). But when they return with
Benjamin and Joseph sees that his youngest brother is well – Joseph relents
from punishing them.
It is then that he reveals who he is, and he offers them forgiveness and
calls for the reunion and reconciliation of their family. He asks them to bring
their father to Egypt and promises to take care of them all from his position
of power. In many ways the end result of the story is a shock to us, because in
our world people are much more likely to seek revenge than they are to offer
forgiveness.
For many of us, the thought of forgiving others is a great thought, but it
is much more difficult to do than it is to practice! I like what C.S. Lewis
said, 'Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to
forgive.' We have a hard time healing the pain, so we have a hard time letting
go of the past in order to forgive.
“Now, don’t be upset and don’t be angry with yourselves that you sold me
here. Actually, God sent me before you to save lives. We’ve already had two
years of famine in the land, and there are five years left without planting or
harvesting. God sent me before you to make sure you’d survive and to rescue
your lives in this amazing way. You didn’t send me here; it was God who made me
a father to Pharaoh, master of his entire household, and ruler of the whole
land of Egypt.”
This is a significant change of perspective – Joseph comes to understand
that while his brothers meant to harm him, God was able to use that painful and
broken circumstance to bring about greater good. What this teaches us, is that
for us to be able to see beyond the pain in our lives, we need to be able to
shift our perspective and see the whole situation from another angle.
For example: In The Book of Joy the
Dalai Lama talks about his exile. While he was the young leader of Tibet, China
came into the country and took it over – the Dalai Lama had to flee for his
life. So for the past half-century he has been an exile from his own homeland.
Yet hearing him talk about this calamity is amazing, because he has been able
to reframe the situation more positively. He can see not only the negatives and
what he has lost, but he also sees the gains from it: wider contact, new
relationships, less formality and more freedom. He then explains: “So
therefore, if you look from one angle, you feel, Oh, how bad, how sad. But if
you look from another angle at that same tragedy, that same event, you see that
it gives me new opportunities.”[1]
This shift in perspective does not make what happened less wrong. He still
feels that it was very wrong that the Chinese took over Tibet by force and
refuse to grant it back its freedom, but the wider perspective does change
emotionally how he feels about it. Rather than be filled by anger and
resentment, rather than seeing his life as having been ruined by the hardship,
he sees the ways that it has brought good for him and others.
Joseph realizes that God has used the evil to bring about good. It doesn’t
change that it was wrong for his brothers to sell him into slavery. But it
changes how he feels about it.
So when we look back on our lives and we think about something wrong that
was done to us, when we think back upon the ways a person has hurt us or we
have been oppressed by society – what these examples suggest to us is that we
should strive to change our perspective and see the good that has come from the
situation.
Perhaps you are stronger as a person now, perhaps you have grown closer to
your family, perhaps your faith and relationship with God are deeper than ever,
perhaps you have experienced things that you never would have otherwise –
meeting people that you would not have, learning skills you would not have. Not
that this makes what happened to us, okay. The wrongs are still wrong. We still
speak out against them and strive to change what we can, but . . . we also know
in our hearts that God was at work through even the darkest days building us up
and guiding us to a new place.
He talks about being cut off in traffic and imagining what that person is
going through – perhaps they are rushing to the hospital because his wife is
giving birth or her loved one is dying.
He says: “I have sometimes said to people, when you are stuck in a traffic
jam, you can deal with it in one of two ways. You can let the frustration
really eat you up. Or you can look around at the other drivers and see that one
might have a wife who has pancreatic cancer. It doesn’t matter if you don’t
know exactly what they might have, but you know they are all suffering with
worries and fears because they are human. And you can lift them up and bless
them. You can say, Please, God, give each one of them what they need.”[2]
He explains that this process helps him remember that others are also
suffering, and helps him to have compassion for them. That is another shift in
perspective. It is no longer just about me and mine, but it is about all of us
as a community and a world who are seeking to live together.
So perhaps in our Bible story Joseph had thought back to his early life and
he had looked at it from his brothers’ perspective. Maybe he had seen his own
part in causing his brothers’ anger. Or maybe as he sat there day after day as
they gave food to many people during the famine he saw that he was not alone in
suffering, that lots of people suffered and that right now God had given him a
position in which he could relieve suffering. So as his brothers come before
him, he can see that he has a choice – to deepen the suffering they are already
experiencing from their immense hunger, or he can be a way of alleviating that
suffering and be an agent of forgiveness and healing. Perhaps he was beginning
to see things from God’s perspective.
The lesson here is easy to say, but it is hard to actually do. When we are
in pain, even when that pain is caused by others, one of the best things that
we can do is see beyond the pain, try to see the situation from God’s
perspective, knowing all that is happening in the world, all that each person
is suffering, and having compassion. And we can look at our suffering from all
angles, (And I admit this is much easier years later when we can see the fruit
of the suffering). As we learn to see things from new perspectives, as we see
beyond our individual pain, the hope and prayer is that we can find deepest
peace with what has happened in our past even as we are encouraged to be agents
of God who work to bring healing and forgiveness to a hurting world.
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