A Fourth Church Sermon by Hardy H. Kim

Sunday, August 17, 2014 | 9:30/11:00 a.m.

Hardy H. Kim
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 133
Genesis 45:1–15

It is absolutely crucial to keep in constant touch with what is going on in your own life’s story and to pay close attention to what is going on in the stories of others’ lives. If God is present anywhere, it is in those stories that God is present. If God is not present in those stories, then you might as well give up the whole business.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter’s Dictionary.

After a couple of weeks of vacation, it’s good to be back in worship with all of you this morning. I spent a couple of weeks away from the church, spending time with my wife and children in the city. We got to visit with my brother and my parents, traveling to southwest Michigan and enjoying the sand and sun on the lake. We topped off that time of rest and relaxation with a great celebration for the seventieth birthdays of my father and his six closest friends from church. We gathered together as one big extended Korean American family, telling stories, sharing good food and company, and reflecting on the amazing journeys that our mothers and fathers have experienced as immigrants to this country.

As a result of all of this, I came back to my office this past Monday believing myself refreshed and ready to get back to work. I was eager to continue connecting with new colleagues and digging even deeper into conversations about direction and vision for our ministry together. I knew that I had a great passage of scripture to work with for today’s sermon—the end of Joseph’s story, that we just heard—and I was excited to see what insight God’s Spirit would give me, how I might be led to speak a word of inspiration to you all. And I was filled with anticipation over two straight weekends of barbecue cook-offs with my friend and pastoral teammate, John Vest. (I can still say this, in spite of my painful defeat in our Chicago Lights fundraising event yesterday. Congratulations, John.)

However, as I came back and sat at my desk and began to open up emails, and as I started to dig back into the stream of information that we all encounter as we go about our daily work, I found my sense of anticipation and my positive energy being sucked right out of me. The news about what was going on in the world was overwhelmingly hard to take in. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I had spent a couple of weeks largely unplugged from the 24/7 newsfeed that floods our collective awareness; maybe I hadn’t checked my social media feeds as much as I was used to doing in my regular day-to-day. Whatever the case, when I returned to work and the world this past Monday, it felt like I was returning to a total disaster.

There was news about further escalations of tensions between Ukraine and Russia and more threats and ultimatums from their partners. Reports were constant about the continued spread of the Ebola epidemic in Western African nations and even greater death tolls. There was a shocking story about substance abuse, mental and physical illness, ultimately leading to personal despair and suicide for a beloved public figure. The stream of children and families fleeing violence in Central American countries had continued, and it was painful to hear how they were being met with hostility and incarceration, legal and bureaucratic nightmares at the border of our country, when we had once taken pride in seeing ourselves as a welcoming refuge for all who held hope for a better future for themselves and their children. I saw images of seemingly endless war and unquenchable anger in Israel and Palestine and Iraq. Finally, and in some ways most discouragingly, there was a torrent of news about the killing of an unarmed black teenager by white police officers, the reemergence of the frightening menace of racial hostility born of our legacy of racism, and ill-spoken and heavy-handed public officials facing off against angry crowds in riots and continued violence.

Having a positive and productive week suddenly felt like a long shot. I was discouraged about being able to provide a good and relevant sermon that could deal with all of this. And even my enthusiasm for barbecue cook-offs was, all of a sudden, feeling like a petty self-indulgence.

Basically, the news of the world was ruining my plans. It was messing up the story I had set out for myself about what my return to work and life here should look like. And, I will admit, I was not happy about it.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news about events all around us, maybe you can relate to how I was feeling. It seems events around the world are overwhelming our best efforts and getting us down, derailing our efforts to stay positive and hopeful. Our awareness of the sheer volume and horrific nature of many situations around us threatens to rush into our lives and wash away our own plans for our personal happiness and wholeness.

These were the things going through my head and through my heart as I approached our text for today, the story from Genesis about Joseph and his meeting with his brothers. In our reading today we glimpse the emotional and climactic meeting between Joseph and his brothers, during which he reveals to them who he really is. Now, this happens at the end of a long and convoluted series of events.

At the beginning of the story we meet Joseph, the favorite of Jacob’s twelve sons. He’s only seventeen, a dreamer, and as we’ll soon see pretty self-involved and inexperienced. He dreams amazing dreams that paint a picture for him of the great story that his own life is going to be. He dreams strange visions that cause him to think that even his brothers and his parents will bow down to him and his greatness.

You know Joseph is self-involved and naïve because he makes the mistake of telling his brothers about these dreams—his brothers who already resent him on account of his father’s favoritism. So it’s no great surprise when one day—far away from the gaze of their father—they set upon Joseph, intending to kill him. Only, one of his brothers, Reuben, the oldest, convinces the rest not to kill Joseph but to sell him to merchants passing by and to concoct a story to make their father believe that his favorite son had been killed by a wild animal. By these merchants Joseph is sold into the service of a powerful man in Egypt, but even though he serves this man well and faithfully, he again suffers a terrible injustice: he is accused of a crime he did not commit, and he ends up in prison. During his time in prison, Joseph, who got himself in trouble by his dreams, ends up showing a gift for interpreting them. This gift, and his wisdom in managing a crisis, leads him to a powerful position in the government of Egypt, overseeing the whole household of Pharaoh and the welfare of the nation. In this way Joseph comes to save Egypt from a terrible famine and, as it happens, he saves his family as well, though they don’t know it’s his hand at work.

And now, in our reading, we see Joseph lay the truth bare before his brothers—the truth about who he is, what has happened, and where he has ended up. Can we even imagine what would it have been like, for Joseph, in that moment? Consider all the different emotions, desires, motivations that must have been churning in his heart. He must have asked himself, “Why not take revenge on these brothers, who sold me into slavery? They’re completely at my mercy. Indeed, it wouldn’t even be revenge! It would just be justice, wouldn’t it?”

So many terrible things had passed between Joseph and his brothers, and he had encountered so many hardships as a result of his own pride and because of their resentment. Yet even in the face of all this, we encounter a Joseph who is grateful for his present situation, instead of angry about the past. We find him telling his brothers the story of how he ended up being before them—telling them using words that seem free of hurt at the wrongs his brothers have done to him. Instead he assures them of their safety and asks about the welfare of his family.

Well-known priest Henri Nouwen wrote a series of meditations entitled “The Inner Voice of Love” during a painful and difficult time in his own life, and in one of these meditations he talks about what it takes to tell our story in freedom. He writes,

When you keep reliving painful events of the past, you can feel victimized by them. But there is a way of telling your story that does not create pain.

There are two ways of telling your story. One is to tell it compulsively and urgently, to keep returning to it because you see your present suffering as the result of your past experiences. . . . [Or] you can tell your story from the place where it no longer dominates you. You can [choose to] speak about it with a certain distance and see it as the way to your present freedom. The compulsion to tell your story is gone. . . . It has lost its weight and [instead] can be remembered as God’s way of making you more compassionate and understanding toward others.

Perhaps because Joseph had reached a place of peace where he could tell his story in freedom, perhaps because he had found, in his trials, a source for compassion and understanding for his brothers (instead of a well of bitterness) he was able, as Walter Brueggemann describes, to take a “second hard look” at his own life. Brueggemann, noted biblical scholar, writes of this very passage:

If Joseph’s life had been only his private story that he could work out according to his loves and his hates, he would have been justified in killing his brothers, for he owed them a good bit of retaliation and getting even.

He does not do that, however, because he does not act out of his own private inclination. . . . Joseph, man of faith, takes a second hard look at his life. . . . He is willing to host the hidden, inscrutable, unresolved purpose of God for his life that is beyond his control. He is willing to trust that there is a larger purpose being acted out in and through him, which he must honor and to which he must respond, even if it means denying his first raw inclination of anger and hate.

Seen through the lenses of the wisdom of Nouwen and Brueggemann, Joseph’s approach toward his brothers, the revelation of his identity and his expression of hope in his present situation, the way he tells his story—it isn’t just the revelation of a happy plot twist at the end of a complicated family drama; it’s an act of freedom: freedom from the pain of the past, freedom to tell his own story as a source of compassion for his brothers. And telling his story in this way is, for Joseph, an act of faith, of recognizing that his story is not his own but instead something that belongs to God.

Can we tell our own stories in this way?

Many people concerned with the fate of mainline Protestant churches—especially liberal churches like our own—believe that we’ve lost something of this ability. Furthermore, this leads them to see that not being able to tell our stories this way is a big reason for the overall decline in our communities.

Many present-day liberal Protestants, especially younger members of our community, no longer believe that there even is a bigger story of progress in our history. They don’t possess a sense of the inevitability of, or the need for, the growth of the kingdom of God in our world. And many of us, if we’re honest, find it hard to see God at work in history (especially in all those difficult news stories I mentioned), and we certainly often fail to see God in the everyday details of our own lives.

Though there might be many good things about a liberal Protestantism like our own (one that emphasizes the importance of each individual and teaches us to mistrust any authority that would negate our own experiences), this lack of a sense of a bigger story—of bigger forces at work and bigger things at stake in the world—might help explain why many of us don’t feel an urgent duty to take social and political responsibility for reforming the world to embody the peace to which God calls us or to be a part of establishing God’s new creation. Unfortunately, for many of us today our story is only about us. And because our story is only about us, we have no power or duty to change a world of stories that are about other people, even when the suffering of creation and the need of God’s people are so clear in those stories.

But what if we could tell our stories in freedom? What if we could move beyond our personal hurts or frustrations and not be dominated by them? What if we could find in them the power to be compassionate and understanding toward others? Maybe then could we start to be more like Joseph?

If we started telling our own stories in this way we might recognize that we cannot act from our own agendas, seeking justice and fairness only for ourselves, no matter what it might cost others. And even if we haven’t suffered like Joseph, telling our stories in freedom and then seeing them as a part of God’s bigger story might allow us to see that the power, position, the wealth, the resources that we enjoy, that all of these things are not ours because of what we have done, to see that it is not our own power and agency that leads to our blessings. Instead we might see, as Joseph did, that “it is not [us, or our parents, or our friends, or anything else in our past that has put us] here . . . [only] God.”

If the perspective of Joseph’s tale is true, then it cannot be right to indulge the petulant feelings I was experiencing this past week. How can I continue to think of the terrible news from all around the world as just annoyances, ruining my return to work, complicating my sermon preparation, dampening my enjoyment of food and fun?

If Joseph’s way is correct, then the news of the world is God’s story and our own lives and concerns are just small parts of the bigger picture—one in which the freedom we have to live and work, speak and listen, think and act, are meant to play a role in God’s plan to preserve life and to free all creation from pain and suffering.

If we really believe that our stories are just a part of the bigger story of what God is doing in the world, then we can find the freedom and faith to engage our own stories with the stories of the rest of the world, no matter how painful. We can call on our government to model thoughtful diplomacy and restraint in the face of aggression abroad, because our creator, who made all things, is ready to grant us mercy to any nation and people. We can remind others that coming near to and healing the sick is a part of following Jesus Christ, who did the same, even if it means we might get sick ourselves. And we can find, in our own stories, the compassion to reach out to others who are experiencing isolation and despair or self-hate, because we follow a Lord who experienced pain and marginalization for our sake and who recognized that curing illness was more than simply correcting a physical problem but instead required restoring the sick to the community of God. We can be the first to welcome in orphans and strangers, not just into our borders but into our homes as well, because our God welcomed us when we had no place or name and made us a part of the holy family though we did not deserve it.

We can issue a prophetic call to peace and unity, claiming all people as sisters and brothers, regardless of history, even when the path to a future without war is hidden from us, because we worship a God who sees all and whose promises of peace are grounded in a love that is beyond even the worst we can do to one another, a love that claims all people as children. We can even face the demons of racism and we can stand with communities torn apart by grief and seemingly irredeemable loss, because we follow a God who gave up a beloved Son, one who deserved honor, glory, and praise but instead was given a cross and died upon it in order to expose the brokenness of communities that would rule their people by violence and enslave the many for the benefit of a few.

Frederick Buechner reminds us that exploring our stories—telling them and finding power in them the way Joseph did—is essential to our faith community because, he explains, our faith is not (in the end) founded upon ideas or institutions. Our faith is based on a story. He urges us saying,

It is well to remember because it keeps our eyes on the central fact that the Christian faith always has to do with flesh and blood, time and space, more specifically with your flesh and blood and mine, with the time and space that day by day we are all of us involved with, stub our toes on, flounder around in trying to look as if we have good sense. In other words, the Truth that Christianity claims to be true is ultimately to be found, if it’s to be found at all, not in the Bible, or the Church, or Theology—the best they can do is point to the Truth—but in our own stories.

If the God you believe in as an idea doesn’t start showing up in what happens to you in your own life, you have as much cause for concern as if the God you don’t believe in as an idea does start showing up.

It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to keep in constant touch with what is going on in your own life’s story and to pay close attention to what is going on in the stories of others’ lives. If God is present anywhere, it is in those stories that God is present. If God is not present in those stories, then you might as well give up the whole business.

Sisters and brothers, the world out there, its concerns and its stories: they’re not a distraction from the main story, from our story. In all of these stories, God is at work and is calling us to be engaged and working towards God’s own purposes as well.

If we can do the work of seeing God in the stories around us, and if we can see God even in our own stories, if we can give up our stories to God, so that God can use us, and if we can tell our story in freedom like Joseph—the one who saved his own family by doing so—then, friends, who knows what we might do? And who knows whom we might save?