A Fourth Church Sermon by Rocky Supinger

Sunday, August 13, 2017 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 85:8–13
Genesis 37:1–4, 12–28

Evil cannot achieve lasting form in a coherent, workable plan.

R. R. Reno, Genesis

The thirty-seventh chapter of Genesis begins the story of Joseph. It is Genesis’s longest story and its last. For twenty-five whole chapters this book has been occupied with the story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—a story mostly about the improbable promise of God to bless and to make a great nation out of an aging couple with no special pedigree or qualities.

The birth of Jacob’s twelve sons and his settling in the land promised to his grandfather suggests that the promise is well on its way to fulfillment. But that’s not the end of the story. In fact, by the end of the part we just heard, that promise is on its way out of town after being tossed down a hole and into a pit.

The Pit: that’s where Joseph’s brothers throw him. A pit. But also, the Pit.

In biblical terminology, “The Pit” is a place of utter desolation and even death. The psalms speak of the pit over and over again.

Psalm 69
Do not let the flood sweep over me,
   or the deep swallow me up,
   or the Pit close its mouth over me.

Psalm 88
I am counted among those who go down to the Pit;
   I am like those who have no help.

The Pit. Watching the events in Charlottesville yesterday, I felt a gnawing fear that our country is being swallowed up by the Pit before our very eyes. Chants of “blood and soil,” swastika signs, and Heil Hitler salutes are not things I ever thought I would see with my own eyes, and the sight of them yesterday fills me with a sensation that something very evil is beginning to close its mouth over us.

Again.

This is a Pit I have spent my life complacently believing we had climbed out of. Yesterday’s events show just how much of an illusion that has been. Observing the failure of our president to condemn these racists as racists (even as members of his own party clearly did just that) makes me fear that we will have no help in trying to climb out of it.

The Pit is the place the story we just heard from Genesis deposits Joseph, hated and dumped by his own family like a busted television down a ditch. On one level, it’s simply a pit, a water cistern dug into the ground for catching and storing winter rains. It’s deep. It’s empty. There’s no way out of it.

But in another sense, it’s “the” Pit, the place he is meant to die a long slow death of dehydration and starvation, utterly alone. He has no help. No one is coming to save him. No one is coming to bury him. The Pit is closing its mouth over Joseph. Today it feels like we are in there with him

But I’m here to tell you that the pit is not the end of the story.

The story was already supposed to be over. Verse one sounds like an ending, doesn’t it: “Jacob settled in the land where his father had lived as an alien, the land of Canaan.” Fade to black, cue music, roll credits. Maybe add a postscript: a genealogy would be a fitting way to demonstrate the end of wandering and the beginning of settling, multiplying, enjoying the fruits of the struggle for future generations.

You know it doesn’t work out that way. You know the struggle isn’t over. The promised land is not the end of the story but its beginning. The posture of the sojourner has always suited the faithful better than the posture of the settler.

The watchword of the story of biblical faith is not “soil,” but “go,” the “go” of God to Abram and Sarai that is repeated over and over again across generations until it becomes Jesus’ “go” to his disciples.

The life of a disciple begins in a place of promise, but it does not end there. The promises of baptism—that we are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever—are the starting gun for the race of faith, not the finish line. The promises we make in joining a church, the promises several people will make later this morning, are built on active, not passive, verbs: share, give, seek.

The promised land is not the end of the story, because faith’s promises are lived in relationship. The church that receives the baptized and welcomes new members is a community, and communities are constantly changing.

Not always for the good.

We spent this week of Vacation Bible School sharing the story of the Apostle Paul with children, and a regular feature of that story is divisions and disagreements within the churches he started. In Corinth, they learned, everybody wanted to be in charge and nobody wanted to serve. In Galatia, the divisions extended to practically every element of their life.

Conflict has been a part of church life from the very beginning. If it weren’t, then half of the New Testament—the epistles to those churches—would have had no occasion to be written.

The church is a kind of family. For Jacob’s family, life in the promised land is infected by a pernicious kind of conflict. Some members of the household hate another member and cannot speak peaceably to him.

Has this ever happened in your family? Maybe you wouldn’t use the word hate to describe it (or maybe you would), but I suspect it’s a common enough situation in families that members of it cease speaking to one another. Are there people in your family you just don’t speak to? Have people stopped speaking to you? Are you the intermediary between family members who don’t speak to each other?

Religious sociologist and Virginian Diana Butler-Bass, who has spoken here in this sanctuary, shared this on Facebook yesterday: “I called my brother to account tonight for his racism and white supremacist views. He defended the Nazis in Charlottesville. I couldn’t stand it any longer. And I am sad to say that I no longer have a brother.”

In some families, silence is the least of it. My parents tell me that when we were little, my older brother tried to push me out of a moving car. I don’t remember that, but I do remember the day from our childhood when he sprayed WD-40 into my eyes because I wouldn’t give him the Matchbox car I was playing with.

Family members can do much worse things to one another than not speak.

Joseph’s brothers hatch a plan to kill him, fling his body into a cistern, and then make up a story to cover up his murder. It is a conspiracy to commit three crimes in one. The most obvious is murder. But there is also the intention to discard the body in a cistern, depriving it of a proper burial, and there is a bold-faced lie to their father about what happened.

It makes you wish, for his sake, Joseph’s brothers just had a can of WD-40 on hand.

They have Reuben, though. Reuben proposes deleting the murder part of the plot. Shedding blood is a no-no. Cain killed Abel and was driven away. God told Noah that the cost of taking a human life would be one’s own life. So the plan becomes to throw Joseph into the pit alive, because Reuben thinks he’ll be able to come back later and pull him out.

Unfortunately for Joseph, there is also Judah. Judah’s contribution to Operation Joseph is to sell his baby brother to those traders over there. Judah sees a financial opportunity where the others see only hate. He’s suggesting that you can turn your hatred of a person to your advantage. Why murder Joseph when they can sell him?

Murder him, strip him, fling him down a hole, lie about his death, sell him: there are layers and layers of evil in the evil perpetrated against Joseph.

Evil is not the end of the story either, though.

Many biblical mentions of the Pit speak not of its horrors but of God’s intent to deliver us from it. The words of Job serve as a particular stirring testament to God who has

“redeemed my soul from going down to the Pit,
and my life shall see the light.”
God indeed does all these things,
twice, three times, with mortals,
to bring back their souls from the Pit,
so that they may see the light of life.

Joseph is brought back from the Pit by a nomadic band of traders. It’s a confusing turn of events, for readers as much as for the conspirators. The brothers have just agreed over lunch to sell their brother to some Ishmaelite traders they see passing by, but then, before they can polish off the potato salad, he’s taken and sold from under their noses by another group of traders.

Joseph’s brothers don’t account for this variable: other evil actors operating on their own agenda, outside the sphere of the brothers’ control.

As wicked schemes do, Joseph’s brothers’ conspiracy buckles beneath the weight of its own complication. Then its legs are definitively kicked away by other actors that the conspiracy never even considered.

Commentator R.R. Reno suggests this last turn in the story demonstrates something about the “self-defeating nature of human sin.”

“The brothers,” he writes, “cannot sustain their murderous consensus. Delays brought by both indecision and the allure of a good meal gives time for complications to emerge. The greed of others ends up thwarting both Reuben’s and Judah’s plans. In the end, the brothers, who at first seemed so clear-minded in their wicked plan to kill Joseph, are entirely confused about what has happened to him. They are bumbling participants in an evil sequence of events.”

Evil is not the end of the story, because those who plot it cannot see far enough into the future to bring their schemes to success. They are not as smart as they think they are. They lack the control over events they think they possess. They’re distracted.

I choose to view the people we watched marching through Charlottesville on Friday night and yesterday morning as bumbling participants in an evil sequence of events. I choose to laugh at them, even as I am moved to horror by the things coming out of their mouths and the unholy things promised in their chants and signs.

Perhaps it rings overly confident on a day like today, but today I am holding to Reno’s conviction that “evil cannot achieve lasting form in a coherent, workable plan. That is why there is always something darkly, pathetically comic about wickedness: The Unabomber in his Montana cabin penning long diatribes, Hitler dreaming of the glory of the Reich in his Berlin bunker in the final weeks of the war, the propaganda machine of the old Soviet empire churning out slogans for the workers [let us add another example: the organizers of the Unite the Right march desperately defending a statue of Robert E. Lee]. Given the pointless death and suffering caused, the images rightly horrify—but they also amuse in their surreal absurdity.”

“This,” Reno concludes, is a “deep fact about evil: it’s bumbling, comical, and self-defeating character.”

In other words, evil is a joke.

The alt-right is a joke. “Take America Back”? What a joke. Volunteer militias are a joke. Those white shields and those black helmets are a joke. Those torches and those salutes are a joke. Swastikas and Confederate flags are a joke. White supremacy is a joke. The KKK is a joke. And any person who is unable to condemn all of this by name is a joke.

The church of Jesus Christ laughs in the face of this evil. We laugh and we stand firm as we tell a truer story, as we confess our complacency and even our involvement in these plots, as we pray for the coming of the gospel vision of every person as a beloved child of God regardless of race. We laugh in the face of this evil as we sing a more beautiful song and recite a more powerful creed, a song about accepting one another and a creed of communion and forgiveness and resurrection and life everlasting.

That is no joke.

Amen.