Epiphany 7C, 20 February 2022. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
Genesis 45:3-11 & 15. He kissed all his brothers and wept upon them.
1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50. Someone will ask, “How are the dead raised?”
Luke 6:27-38. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over will be put into your lap.
Most Merciful and Compassionate, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
As I began the process of preparing my sermon for you over the last ten days or so, I found myself surprised by our readings and wondered if you’d recognize them. It’s rare to have a 7th Sunday in Epiphany; I don’t think that there has been one in lectionary Year C in my 20 years of ordained ministry! My first clue that there was something unusual going on was the lesson from Genesis about Joseph encountering his brothers in Pharaoh’s court. We’ve been hearing portions from Isaiah and Jeremiah through Epiphany and, suddenly, unexpectedly, stunning high drama of the end of Genesis falls into our laps? I wonder, how many of you even know the back story. If Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat wasn’t a part of your cultural experience in the 1970’s, or you didn’t have at least half a dozen years of Sunday School, how would you know?
Here’s a synopsis of about a dozen chapters of Genesis: Joseph was the 11th of 12 sons of Jacob (aka Israel). Jacob had his last two sons with Rachel, who died in childbirth delivering Benjamin. The legend goes that Joseph was Jacob’s favorite, and his brothers were insanely jealous of their father’s favoritism and Joseph’s dreams of superiority. When Joseph was 17, his brothers couldn’t take it anymore and decided to kill him, then changed their minds and threw him into a pit instead. He got pulled out and sold into slavery. The brothers tore up Joseph’s “ornamented tunic,” a special gift from their father, put goat blood on it, and told Jacob that his beloved son must have been killed. [1] Joseph ended up in Egypt, where he was enslaved in a wealthy household and then jailed by the jealous master, whose wife lusted after Joseph. While in jail, Joseph interpreted the dreams of fellow prisoners and gained the attention and then the trust of Pharaoh, who made Joseph the second-most-powerful person in Egypt, in charge of managing food supplies for the empire through a severe famine. Meanwhile, starving in the land of Canaan, Joseph’s brothers learned that there was plenty to eat in Egypt, so they headed there to beg for food. They didn’t recognize Joseph when they met with him, but he knew them. He gave them sacks of food but hid a golden cup in youngest brother Benjamin’s sack. He then accused Benjamin of theft and threatened to imprison him. The brothers begged to be imprisoned in Benjamin’s place. Then Joseph was moved to reveal who he really was. That’s where our story this morning picks up. Whew!
What’s missing in our reading is the beautiful verse in which Joseph and Benjamin wept on each other’s necks. It’s a poignant acknowledgement that the injury inflicted by the older brothers was not just to Joseph, not just to Jacob, but also to Benjamin. There is mutual weeping with the two sons of Rachel. There is weeping over the other ten brothers. What there is not, is righteous retribution; there is not vindictiveness; there is no Schadenfreude at their desperate circumstances. There is mercy, compassion, and a promise of material restoration and care with a strong sense of divine providence turning decades of tragedy into a future of dignity and grace. Walter Brueggemann describes Joseph’s work as reinterpreting the past, redefining the present, and reimagining the future.[2]
In this light shining from Genesis, I can see that Jesus was teaching Torah in Luke’s “Sermon on the Plain.” When we studied this passage in vestry last week, someone asked what translation we were using. I answered, “NRSV” (New Revised Standard Version), but what I really should have answered was, “Luke’s translation,” because it’s the Gospel of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount that gets the most airtime in the Church’s lectionary; so it’s much more familiar. Matthew’s lens is lawyerly: he talks about legal obligations and lawsuits in his understanding of Jesus’ teaching. Luke’s translation focuses on healing. (Our tradition is that Luke was a healer because he is described in Colossians as beloved physician and because of the strong theme of healing in his Gospel account of Jesus’ ministry.) Comparing Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of Jesus’ teaching, it becomes clear to me that one is taking a legal approach, and the other, a healing approach, to address wrongdoing. Both are useful; I just wish we heard more of a balance in our readings from Torah and from the Gospels.
Whichever the approach, however, Jesus’ teachings are hard; the challenges are huge. Even if we agree with the ideas and the ideals (and I know we don’t, but even if we did), putting them into practice takes a lifetime of work. Often in conversation about these teachings, there’s a quick move to the extremes: what about someone who is in an abusive or exploitative relationship? What about a tyrant? What then? Are we to be passive or complacent? How do we reckon with evil without indulging it? Jesus’ answers have to do with responding restoratively rather than retributively. Restoring what? Restoring dignity. Jesus is asserting the power of dignity in undignified circumstances. Jesus has no tolerance for public shaming or humiliation, and he knew that violence would never end violence. Only creative non-violence will do that. Hatred will never overcome hatred; only love will do that. (That’s a teaching from the Buddha.) Similarly, Jesus is laying out a path of non-violent, dignified responses to injuries in ways that affirm self-worth and the worth of the other, even if it’s completely obscured.
But what if we cannot manage to love our enemies? What if we cannot get as far as loving. Maybe some of you heard Krista Tippett’s rebroadcast of “On Being” this week, or you might remember it from 2013. It’s about what to do when love is too hard or too frightening. What to do is move toward non-hate as a way to step outside of what Pádraig Ó Tuama calls “the energy of enmity,” [3] which keeps us trapped or stuck. In her podcast, Tippett was interviewing scholar and Tibetan Buddhist monk Robert Thurman and Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzburg. They said, for them, the first step toward non-hatred is to become aware of how it feels to be scared and angry inside of oneself, not discounting or ignoring the injury. If you’re like me, you have opportunities to feel scared or angry almost every day. The second step is to cultivate a desire to not be stuck there: a desire to heal. Non-hate is the beginning of the journey toward Love. If you’re like me, you also have opportunities to step out of that narrow place of desire for revenge and into a place of mercy and compassion, even if it’s a baby step. Robert Thurman, however, cautions that “one should never confuse compassion for oneself with self-indulgence.”
The idea of non-hate being the beginning of a journey, connects for me to Jesus’ command to be merciful. The verb can also be translated become. Become merciful like the Holy One, who is merciful. Be in relationship with divine mercy – for yourself and for others, along the Way. Do not judge, and you will not be judged (not by others, but by the Holy One). Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned by the Holy One. Perhaps you hear the echo of “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us” from the way Jesus taught his followers to pray. I don’t know about you, but I’m always hoping that God will forgive us our sins better than we forgive those who sin against us, because, as a group, we’re not that good at it yet. The end result will be an abundance of good – so much that it will be running over, making a big mess in your lap!
I want to close by saying something about our lesson from First Corinthians. I just love Paul’s words of assurance that someone is going to ask, how are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come? In other words, how exactly does resurrection work? “Fool!” he practically shouts. Huh? Listen up, Emmanuelites! Resurrection looks like: “They buried us, but they did not know we were seeds.” Resurrection looks like brothers reunited and forgiven (there’s no record that they actually asked for forgiveness, by the way). Resurrection looks like mercy and compassion, like right-relationship. Resurrection looks like remembering and asserting one’s own dignity in the face of mistreatment. Resurrection looks like respecting the dignity of every human being, and for Christians, like seeking and serving Christ in all persons, even when you cannot see evidence of the Christ. It looks like restorative, rather than retributive, justice. It looks like an overflowing messy abundance dropped in our laps. It looks like reinterpreting the past, redefining the present, and reimagining the future. It looks like Love that is stronger than death. Without that love, whatever we do is worth nothing, our opening collect acknowledges. Take that word of God seriously. I beg you.
[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (NY: Norton, 2019).
[2] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis in Interpretation(Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), v. 1, p. 347.
[3] Krista Tippett. On Being. Love your enemies (really)?