Sunday, February 24, 2019 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Cloaked with Grace

Lucy Forster-Smith
Senior Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Genesis 45:1–11, 15
Luke 6:27–38

Love offers us the greatest joy and the greatest pain.

Madeleine L’Engle

In her documentary Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate, Helen Whitney provides, as PBS notes,

an intimate look into the spontaneous outpouring of forgiveness: from the Amish families for the 2006 shooting of their children in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania; the struggle of ’60s radicals to cope with the serious consequences of their violent acts of protest; the shattering of a family after the mother abandons them, only to return seeking forgiveness; the legacy and divisiveness of apartheid and the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa; the penitential journey of a modern-day Germany, confronting the horrific acts of the Holocaust; and the riveting stories of survivors of the unimaginably brutal Rwandan genocide.

“Once a uniquely religious word,” the program description goes on to say, “forgiveness now is changing and there is no consensus about what it is and what it is becoming” (www.pbs.org/program/forgiveness).

Forgiveness is complicated. Say someone cannot remember the harm they inflicted: should they ask to be forgiven? Or if they know they hurt someone, should they have the right to set the terms of how reconciliation can happen? And what about acts so egregious that forgiveness would imply complicity. However you define forgiveness, its power is real—and never more so when it struggles with the unforgivable.

In few other places in the Bible is the power of a changed heart and deep reconciliation and forgiveness more palpable than in the story of Joseph. The back story that leads to our scripture lesson today is likely one of the best-known stories of family unrest in the Bible. Joseph, a bratty little brother, was his father’s favorite, because he was the son of Jacob’s old age. His father suited him up with the coat of many colors, the technicolor dream coat. This fried his brothers, who could not stand the arrogant kid. But they had to admit that he was awfully precocious. He not only had big, visionary dreams, but he took no time at all to share them with his brothers—and probably anyone who would hear him out.

Imagine what it would have been like to have the arrogant, nonstop-talker kid share with his brothers a dream he had the night before. In the dream, Joseph stands over the brothers, and they are groveling before him. We can imagine that this kind of thing went on for quite a while, and after so much of it, they had just had it. Their first move was to plot Joseph’s demise: “Let’s throw him in a pit and bring his bloodied coat back to our father, Jacob, saying a wild animal got him.” But then one of the brothers thought better of it; he suggested they should sell him as a slave. So when some Midianites happened by on the road, they bought him and took him to Egypt.

Well, you likely remember the rest: Joseph eventually wound up in charge of his master’s house; he was in a seductive harassment situation with his master’s wife and was jailed for false accusations. While he was in jail, someone discovered that Joseph not only had fantastical dreams but also had the uncanny ability to interpret dreams. So when the pharaoh was having a recurring dream over many months, the word came to him that a Hebrew slave could interpret them. The pharaoh called for Joseph to come, hear the dream, and interpret it. When he did, Pharaoh was very impressed. From there, Joseph advanced through the government ranks and eventually oversaw the securing of food for Egypt in anticipation of a famine. When the famine came over all the earth, Jacob, Joseph’s papa sent ten of his sons to buy food in Eqypt. And that closes in on today’s scene.

The brothers come to buy food, and they wind up standing at Joseph’s feet. They do not recognize him. Joseph recognizes them and sets to giving them a hard time, having a little payback. When the ten are standing in front of him, Joseph inquires if the whole family is present. The brothers admit to one of their kin being dead and another younger son being back home with papa. Joseph sends them back to Palestine to fetch his brother, Benjamin, who happens to be Joseph’s full brother. When the brothers tell Jacob that in order to get food in Egypt they have to return with the young one, Benjamin, it clearly sends a shriek of terror through Jacob, but he consents to sends him. The brothers return to Egypt, and when they come before Joseph again, they still don’t recognize him. Now all of the brothers stand before him, all eleven of them.

This is when the grand epiphany arrives. It is evident that Joseph was playing them to some extent by withholding his identity when they came to Egypt earlier. He saw his kin groveling before him, as he had seen in the dream. And we realize that Joseph could, with one wave of his hand, snuff out the life or liberty of all the sons of Jacob. As his eleven brothers stood before him, the text says, Joseph could not control himself any longer. With weeping, with a longing burning in his very bones that must have overtaken his anger at them, with his brothers in front of him, Joseph asks that the doors be closed, that the government officials step away. Then with eyes on those who wanted to kill him and instead sold him as a slave, he reveals himself to them. Unable to hold his emotion, he cries out and says to them, “I am Joseph.”

With this stunning disclosure, the world that Joseph’s brothers inhabit is irreversibly shattered. His brothers are rendered silent—no response. They may have assumed they were done-for. They may have assumed they’d be hauled out on attempted murder charges. But Joseph doesn’t act from the past but instead breaks with the past. He offers an alternative future, and the new possibilities come from God alone, not from the contrition of the brothers. And Joseph, whose name means “one added by God,” gives a surplus of meaning and joy and hope to the family that came hungry and leave filled to the brim.

It is the power of God who changes things. Newness of sight and life arise when we let go and trust. Joseph gets up close with his brothers, and we see in his action that “the power to create newness does not come from detachment but from risky, self-disclosing engagement” (Walter Brueggemann, Interpretation: Genesis Commentary, p. 344). I don’t get the sense that Joseph had dreamed up the steps he would take to engage his brothers. It seems that even Joseph might have been as surprised by his admission that this was a God thing. But I am sure that there are many times in our lives when we find ourselves stepping across the chasm of fear, of anger, of resentment, to the holy meeting, the Holiest meeting of broken heart knit back to wholeness by the presence of God.

So we might begin right here and now and quietly and honestly ask whether there is someone in our circle of friends or family that we have not forgiven for a wrong that person may have done to us? Is there someone we have separated ourselves from in anger, maybe “quiet bitterness” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer says (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Collected Sermons of D. Bonhoeffer, p. 178). It is often the case that we bury our anger, our hurt, our discord, and in the weeks, months, or years that ensue, the wound festers or infects other relationships. But in our humanity, we are wired to want nothing more than to forgive and be forgiven, to have that which is broken made whole. What is clear by this story is that newness of life, the God-given abundant life that is promised to each and every one of us, is not a glib, oh-whatever kind of abundance, but it dares to come close, to weep, to hold the door open to the desire for real newness.

There are many aspects or ways one might forgive, and many more ways one might be forgiven. But the one that is at the heart of the Jacob story is the new beginning. Though I am a great believer in therapy and find the power of insight that arises from exploring the past and its power on my life in the present, I am quite taken with the implied direction in this text of the power of God to hold open a new narrative: the narrative of working toward a common future together. Isn’t that what Joseph did with his brothers? He shut the door to his role as a lord in the empire and opened the door to the relationship with his brothers. It is God that creates real newness—and it comes unexpectedly and doesn’t linger to explain how it happens but simply relishes the wonder of it all.

Forgiveness not only arises in moments of individual reckoning, but it comes in the corporate context as well. When politics and economics set up systems that harm groups of people, it takes years to create the possibility of new beginnings. For example, we see it in the aftermath of apartheid in South Africa, which affected so many in that country, just as the stain of racism in this country continues to affect each and every one of us, every day. Often small efforts to undo the ongoing systems of injustice and hurt are dismissed as doing little to address the political and social wreckage that results from overt racist or sexist or abusive practices, but there are places where this is going on.

About fifteen years ago I had the opportunity to sit in a room in Cape Town, South Africa, with Father Michael Lapsley and twenty or so black, brown, and white South African people who, in a back room of a school, gathered to tell stories about their experiences of violation, loss, fear, and brokenness that resulted from the system of racism and separation during Apartheid. Father Lapsley, an Anglican priest, led the discussion as part of an organization called the Institute for the Healing of Memories.

He himself had been a victim of violence while a chaplain to a range of universities in South Africa and an unrelenting voice for the dismantling of apartheid, had received a letter bomb in a church tract delivered to his mailbox. When he opened the tract, both of his hands were blown off, and he lost an eye.

So how did Father Lapsley move from the physical and emotional trauma to establishing the Institute for the Healing of Memories? Father Lapsley said much later, “Quite early on after the bomb I realized that if I was filled with hatred and desire for revenge I’d be a victim forever. If we have something done to us, we are victims. If we physically survive, we are survivors. Sadly, many people never travel any further than this.” He goes on, “In 1992, I returned to South Africa to find a nation of survivors, but a damaged nation. Everyone had a story—a truth—to tell” (www.theforgivenessproject.com/michael-lapsley).

In his work he has developed this program called the Healing of Memories. The workshops explore the effects of South Africa’s past at an emotional, psychological, and spiritual level. As those who have suffered struggle to have their stories recognized, he tries to support them. Through storytelling, engaged trust, and silent-no-more, the power of healing, the power of God’s strengthening, comes forth through real people in real time.

Father Lapsley’s work is not a quiet, sweet forgiveness that overlooks the tragedy, the violence, the upending of life itself. Rather, his activity relies on God to change the equation for us, to bring together what is new for the sake of something larger, something huge, something monumental—the very shaping of our future as the human project on this planet. It is also in Jesus’ words to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. And Jesus’ words, in these complicated times, are very challenging to us, because it seems the whole human project veers very close to the brink. When we work so hard for justice or peace or reconciliation in family, in our neighborhoods, in this country, and with the environment, we have the power to shift the equation. When the culprit whom we believe has harmed us is standing before us or shows up on our newsfeed or on Facebook, we, like Joseph can turn from the old ways, the familiar ways, into the new and unfamiliar resolve of God’s urgent and divine desire for fullness of life! Our love for enemy changes us; the power of such love changed Joseph, changes us!

Where does such vision for undoing the raging conflicts that reside within us and in our world come from? It comes from a tenacious counter-affirmation, which is God’s purpose—utterly gracious. It comes about with the doors shut on the powers that we assume will make the real change—the empires. It comes in a face-to-face encounter of twelve brothers in a palace, one of whom washes the hurt with his tears and finally comes home, truly home to the land of promise. And the cloak that he donned, the cloak of many colors that he rubbed in his brothers’ face, became a cloak of grace, a mantle of gladness, tenaciously binding them together in such harmony and joy that life awakened anew. Amen.