Genesis 50:15-21

Realizing that their father was dead, Joseph’s brothers said, “What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?” So they approached Joseph, saying, “Your father gave this instruction before he died, ‘Say to Joseph: I beg you, forgive the crime of your brothers and the wrong they did in harming you.’ Now therefore please forgive the crime of the servants of the God of your father.” Joseph wept when they spoke to him. Then his brothers also wept, fell down before him, and said, “We are here as your slaves.” But Joseph said to them, “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today. So have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones.” In this way he reassured them, speaking kindly to them.

Sermon Text

There is a great deal of danger in assumptions. We all know some of our own colloquial warnings about assumptions, after all, “Assumptions just make an…” But the more relevant thing, beyond any idiomatic sentiment we might project, is that assumptions are one of the most pressing obstacles between us and the potential that God has for us in the world. When we gather together in this room, and someone new comes in, the thing that might keep them from staying, more than anything else, is assumption people in pews have about them before they even talk to them. When we make plans to do something in the community, what will kill the initiative before it even has time to take root, is assumptions about how an attempt at it would go and how people would receive it. What prevents us from working together, fully and properly, is assuming how the other party in a situation is respond or what they are going to say.

While it is always good to have an ounce of preparation on hand when we go into something, there is very little good that comes from an assumption. Assumptions are made without evidence, without basis except a gut feeling we develop for ourselves. They are arguments we make with ourselves, for ourselves.

When I was a kid, round about ten years, I was out and about with my siblings and my grandmother. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I wasn’t listening like I should have. My grandmother told my step-mother, and my step-mother was going to tell my dad the same. I was so upset. I sat at home, worrying and weeping at the thought of how angry my dad would be at something like this. He got home from work, looked at me, talked to my step-mother, and then said something I do not think I’ll forget. He said, “I am so much more upset, that you would think anything I would do or say to you is worth being this upset about, then I could ever be at you not listening to what your told.” I assumed something, and that broke my father’s heart.

I imagine that the interaction between Joseph and his brothers in our scripture today carries a similar weight. After reconciling with each other, fixing what was broken in their relationship and becoming siblings once again, Joseph’s brothers still did not believe his love for them. Their father, Jacob, died and was buried, and scarcely had they finished closing the entrance of his tomb when his brothers began to worry. They worried that with their father dead Joseph was going to turn on them, his anger for the years of servitude he suffered under bubbling up and overtaking them. They conspired once again to defraud Joseph, inventing a final command from their dead father.[1]

Joseph likely knew that this command was false. Joseph was with his father when he died, and if Jacob had such an important message, he would not have given it through intermediaries. Joseph hears from his brothers that his father apparently worried that he would retaliate against his brothers. The grief he feels for his dead father is compounded with the grief of his brothers’s doubts and he cannot do anything by weep in front of them. His emotions lead to his brothers breaking down as well, and soon the room is full of people wailing at the broken situation they find themselves in.

Joseph’s response to his brothers’s worries capture several different aspects of why he had no right or intention to hurt his brothers. After telling them not to be afraid, he tells them that he is not in the place of God to punish them. There are two lessons from that. Firstly, when we make assumptions we place ourselves in a position like God – claiming to know everything just because of who we are. Secondly, when we decide to punish others for what they have done to us, we take a position only God can have – a position of power we have no right to. Joseph knew his brothers, he knew they had changed, he made no attempt to assume they now were worthy of punishment. Joseph knew that he was only a person, he had no right to attack his brothers so long after they had done him wrong, as if it would change anything.

He then tells his brothers something that demonstrates his perspective on the other side of his struggles. “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.” This simple phrase, something we go to again and again in the Church, captures a perspective that is only possible when someone has truly come to terms with a bad situation. In the midst of trouble, you cannot see it as anything but trouble, but on the other side of it we are able to see the ways that good comes out of even the most dire of places.

The evil the brothers committed is not wiped away by this statement – they sold their brother and lied to their father about it. Joseph still suffered all the horrible things he went through to get where he was. Joseph is not saying that any part of the catastrophe he went through was suddenly baptized into a good thing, but simply that good came out of that mess. The entire Levant was saved because he was in the right place at the right time, only because his brothers did the wrong thing at the worst time. Joseph has spent years picking through the weeds that sprouted in the garden of his life, only through that is he able to celebrate the flowers that bloomed alongside them.

God is always at work in our life, but I am not willing to say that God brings suffering into it. While Isaiah presents the idea that God brings good and evil, he is tackling a specific issue for a specific time.[2] In reality, suffering is a mystery. We do not know why bad things happen the way that they do, except that God is with us even in the midst of the worst parts of life. Sometimes we might talk about God sending us a trial or putting us in a tough situation that we are still able to overcome, but if we sit down and try and do exact calculus about when God does and does not send trouble our way, we will only end up with a headache. If we cannot assume what other people around us are doing, how could we possibly assume what God is doing?

We are called to be God’s hands and feet on Earth, but I think there is a reason scripture never calls us the Head of the Body of Christ. We are doers, and that doing takes some thinking, but when we think we know everything about a situation without seeking out the truth, then we reduce the redemptive work of God to assumptive work. Think of the fights that could be avoided, if we only took some time to listen and ask rather than to assume. Imagine the work we could do if we chased after goodness and how to achieve it, than to assume it is beyond our capabilities. What would happen, if we as the Church stepped down from acting in the place of God, and stuck to our calling – to simply do the work of God, to love one another. The tears we would save, the trouble we would avoid.

Let us all commit ourselves to do away with assumption, and to step down from the false throne we have set up above God’s in our minds. – Amen.

---

[1] Whether Jacob actually told his sons to ask for Joseph’s mercy is contested among interpreters and scholars. I follow the line of interpretation that sees Jacob’s final command as a fiction his brothers are using to protect themselves, as no such conversation occurs in any of the preceding chapters. In the end, the answer to this question depends on the faith we have that Joseph’s brothers will make the right choice… I have very little.

[2] Isaiah 45:7 “I form light and darkness, I create peace and ra (evil, calamity, destruction,)” is a refutation of the idea that God is at war with other divinities and that a heavenly loss against Marduk led to the Babylonian Exile.