“Do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves
for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you
. . . It was not you who sent me here, but God.” ~ Genesis 45:5, 7-8
Later, Joseph again reassures his brothers, offering
forgiveness and saying, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.”
~ Genesis 50:20
In
the musical Into the Woods, the
characters of the Grimm fairy tales seek to gain their wishes only to befall
many terrible ordeals. At one point, the characters take notice of the narrator
who has been behind the scenes moving the story along and commenting on
different character’s actions. They surround him, refuse to let him stand
outside the story and threaten him with violence. The narrator responds:
Narrator: “Well,
that's my role! You must understand, there must always be someone on the
outside!”
Steward: “Well,
you're going to be on the inside now.”
Narrator:
“You're making a big mistake!”
Stepmother:
“Nonsense.”
Narrator: “You
need an objective observer to pass the story along!”
Witch: “Some
of us don't like the way you've been telling it.”
Narrator: “If
you drag me into this mess, you won't know how the story ends! You'll be lost!”
And
they shove him into the arms of an angry giant where he’s squashed. Believe me,
I’ve been there. Not in the arms of a giant but caught in a story that seemed
so hopeless, so senseless, that all I could do was cry out, “Kill the
narrator.” And that’s what many have done or tried to do. But I would like to
offer you a more hopeful response today. At Noah’s, the children have been
learning about the story of Joseph and what God can do with a painful story.
This
past week, bloodstains and tearstains were everywhere. Joseph’s heart was
rubbed raw against the rocks of betrayal and miscarried justice: sold into
slavery by his brothers who wanted him dead, falsely imprisoned for doing the
right thing, and 13 years spent in slavery and prison. It was a life which ping
ponged between fear and hope. Like all our stories, it’s a complicated one.
The truth of the
matter is that all life stories are complicated, with twist and turns, and ups
and downs, and one thing is certain: you can’t be the narrator of your own
life. You can’t see all that has to happen or know the full impact of the
choices you make. You can’t see what’s coming around the bend or what can
happen with a turn of a page.
Yet
time and time again in Joseph’s story, God redeems. The torn robe became a
royal one. The pit became a palace. The broken family is reunited and saved
from a terrible famine. The very acts intended to destroy God’s servant turned
out to strengthen him and in the end those acts - saved them all – and not only
his family but all of Egypt.
“You intended evil against me,” Joseph told his brothers,
using a Hebrew verb that traces its meaning to “weave” or to “plait.” “You wove evil,” he was saying, “but
God rewove it together for good.”
I can’t
pretend to offer language that resolves all the problems of reconciling God’s
existence with the presence of evil in the world. And the Bible itself never
tries to clarify this in any systematic way. Instead, it uses stories because,
as we all know, where language may fail, stories can succeed. The story of
Joseph, therefore, can stand as a living treatise that you can trust. And here is the point: there is a purpose
and narrator for your life. And the narrator is good. This doesn’t mean
that bad really isn’t bad. I’m not claiming that evil is some illusion or that
God is some great Puppet-master in the sky. No, you are free to rage against
evil and call it by name. You are also free to make choices and your choices
can impact others, powerfully so. Yet God is also sovereign and free and thwarts
evil in surprising ways. I want you to entertain the thought that you though
you can’t always see the plot you can know the end. And the end is this: God is
good.
God,
the Master Weaver, stretches the yarn and intertwines the colors, the ragged
twine with the beautiful yarn, the pains with the pleasures. Nothing escapes
His reach. And the good news is that no event or person, not even yourself,
gets to write the conclusion. God is the one who narrates, as Paul Harvey used
to say, the “rest of the story.”
And
the rest of the story is this. The God who created you and gave you breath, who
knows you, loves you, and who has allowed for you to make real choices is
always at work, always weaving, always plaiting, always narrating, to make
something beautiful in the end. And some of us get glimpses of that now even
while some of us still wait. But like any good story there’s one more plot twist.
The characters from Into the Woods
complain that the narrator is always outside and therefore doesn’t understand
their pain. The ancient story of the church, however, answers their heartfelt
cry with good news. The narrator did enter our story – the God of Abraham,
Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, came into our broken and evil world, in Jesus Christ.
He spoke truth, raged against evil, loved deeply, experienced loss and grief,
and just like the characters from Into
the Woods, we killed him. But what we intended for evil God intended for
good and cracked upon death and the grave and made for us a way. Because of
this Jesus we can know the God who doesn’t stand outside our story. We can know
how the story ends.
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