August 17, 2008

Reconciliation of Enemies

by Rev. Dr. Jim Carlson

Genesis 45: 1-15

• Opening Illustration – Genesis as Soap Opera

• Joseph is the ultimate Cinderella story.

• Sold into slavery – becomes servant to Potiphar – one of Pharaoh’s assistants. Unclear whether Potiphar is a general or an administrator.

• Potiphar’s wife – Joseph ends up in jail. Ends up running the jail.

• Pharaoh’s butler and baker end up in jail. Joseph interprets their dreams.

• Pharaoh has dreams – Joseph interprets.

• Joseph becomes ruler of Egypt under Pharaoh.

• Famine – foreseen by Pharaoh comes to pass. Joseph’s family comes to Egypt to buy grain.

• Joseph recognizes them, but they don’t recognize him. He accuses them of spying. Gets a little revenge.

• Puts Simeon in custody – asks them to go back to Canaan and bring Benjamin.

• Brothers tell Jacob that the Egyptians want to meet Benjamin. Jacobs refuses.

• Famine gets worse and Jacob finally allows Benjamin to go.

• Brothers arrive and dinner is served. Benjamin gets fine times as much food as the others.

• Joseph instructs servants to give them grain – place his cup in Benjamin’s sack.

• Brothers leave – Joseph sends servants to stop them and look in Benjamin’s sack. Brothers forced to return and bow to Joseph.

• Joseph sends his servants away and reveals who he is to his brothers.

• Tearful reunion. Joseph claims that God was at work even when they were trying to cause his doom.

• Joseph tells brothers to bring the family down to Egypt where he can take care of them until the famine is over.

• Fascinating story. People of Israel have retold this story to remind themselves that God has always worked to preserve them as a people, despite treachery, disobedience, natural disaster, and foreign invasion.

• Still has similar meaning today. A Few things it tells us about reconciliation and God’s hand in our lives.

• First – no matter how deep the resentment goes, with God’s help reconciliation is always on the table.

        o Brothers had tried to destroy Joseph. Slavery was miserable.

        o Joseph was openly getting revenge on them. Made them miserable.

        o Their sense of family connection never died. Allowed them to be reconciled.

        o Never say never when it comes to family divisions. You never know which tragedy or which celebration will cause those resentments to seem rather unimportant.

• Second – We believe God is working in the world for the good. We do not believe that blindly. We look back at our experiences and the experiences of others and look at how God has acted on our behalf in the past.

        o People of Israel told and retold this story at times when they were suffering or depressed or demoralized.

        o If God had worked in t his way back then, certainly God would work for the good in their present sufferings.

        o We do not blindly say, “I just take it on faith that God is working in the world for my benefit.” We have our own experiences of faith, as well as the experiences of people before us in this church to verify for ourselves that God is active in the world.

        o Those experiences give us hope that God is still active, even when really bad things happen to us.

• Final Illustration – Overtures of Reconciliation by Michael Rodriguez. Story from the Dallas Morning News.

• Mr. Rodriguez will be the first member of the Texas Seven to be put to death. The infamous band of convicts killed an Irving police officer on Christmas Eve 2000, about a week after their escape from prison.

• Officer Aubrey Hawkins had interrupted a holiday dinner with family to respond to a robbery at an Irving sporting goods store. The escapees perforated his squad car with at least 20 bullets. Mr. Rodriguez then pulled the 29-year-old husband and father from the car and stole his gun.

• But that's not the only strike against Mr. Rodriguez in his quest to obtain salvation this evening.

• Before he and the others overpowered workers at a maximum-security prison in South Texas, Mr. Rodriguez had been serving a life sentence for paying a hit man $2,000 to kill his wife in 1992. He lured her to her death, prosecutors said, by holding her hand minutes before the triggerman shot her in front of him.

• "Judge, I have changed immensely since coming to death row," Mr. Rodriguez wrote in 2006, "and realize my punishment is just and I wish to be accountable."

• While on death row, Mr. Rodriguez has claimed a religious conversion. In recent years, he has sent letters to judges requesting that there be no further appeals in his case. And he apologized in a letter to Officer Hawkins' mother, Jayne Hawkins, who has since died of cancer.

• Ms. Hawkins attended the trials of Mr. Rodriguez and the others, and spoke angrily toward them when given the chance.

• "Aubrey faced each one of you, and I will face each one of you," she once said. But she declined to say, when asked by a reporter, whether she wished death upon them.

• "I'm not a vengeful person," she said. "The only peace of mind would be for Aubrey to be here. There's no justice that can be done."

• In a 2006 letter, Mr. Rodriguez told her he realized he owed her a debt he could never repay. "Yet I can indeed offer a form of retribution to at least give you a sense of justice," he wrote.

• Never was any kind of reconciliation. But there is a sense in the minds of both parties that God’s justice did prevail in the end.

• Even in the worst of tragedies, this story reminds us that hope is never lost. When we are like Joseph, out of options, sitting at rock bottom, feeling rejected by the world, we have to remember that God is working to restore our dignity.

• God not only wants to restore our dignity, God also wants to restore our relationships. God wants to see our families as healed and whole as they can be.

• We may not be able to envision such a thing, but God can. We may want revenge, and we may want to give paybacks. But none of that brings anyone any closer together.

• It may have felt good for Joseph to get some revenge on his brothers, but his strongest sense of God’s presence in his life came when he was finally reconciled to them.

• The same is the case for us. We will never have a stronger sense of God’s presence in our lives than we do when we are reconciled to those we hate. That is at the heart of Jesus’ message when he commands us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

• Seek reconciliation, not revenge. For Joseph his reconciliation with his brothers was what allowed him to save his family from starvation. And reconciliation may be what saves us from a life of misery in our families.