Sermon: The word of the Lord kept testing him

I remember as a seven year old being told the story we heard in the first lesson in Scripture lessons and then being asked to draw it. You need to know that art was not my strong subject and to this day I can see in my mind’s eye my failed attempts to draw, half way down the right hand page of my exercise book with its teal coloured cover, a thin cow swallowing a fat cow followed by an equally unsuccessful attempt to draw a thin ear of corn swallowing a fat ear of corn. They were unmitigated failures. What was the point? What a wasted opportunity to get into a story which is not so much about the dream but about Joseph’s handling of this twist and turn in his life’s story.

The Joseph stories are some of the great writing in the Old Testament – they knew how to tell stories in those days and we have dropped into a well-known part of one of them. I’m glad we have this story today when we say goodbye to some of our choristers, because a couple of years ago some of them were in the Chorister School performance of ‘Joseph and his amazing technicolour dreamcoat’ So, choristers, think back to that musical.

For anyone who has forgotten the story, Joseph is the youngest son of Judah. The family is what we would call today dysfunctional because none of them seem to be able to tell the truth or get on with each other, traits that had come down through the generations from great-grandfather Abraham and been multiplied en route. Much of the Joseph story hinges on deceit and concealed identities. So they are not a particularly nice lot, and the story begins with Joseph so annoying his older brothers, by telling them about his dreams in which they all bowed down to him, that they hate him and eventually sell him to some passing traders in the wilderness and hoping they had washed their hands of him. We pick up the story a few years later on when Joseph has ended up as a slave in Egypt in the house of one of Pharaoh’s officials, Potiphar. He is very handsome Poitphar’s wife is more than smitten with him. She makes advances to him when they are on their own, he flees and in her anger she claims he has tried to seduce her and he is thrown into prison. There he languishes for two years in a dungeon. It would have been very tough and no doubt tempting to give into despair or anger.

Put yourself in his shoes: you could tell a good sob story about how everything in life has conspired against you. Your brothers hate you and sell you into slavery in a foreign land, you work hard for your employer and are thrown into prison for loyalty to him.  It’s the stuff of tabloids– banner headline writers could have a field day. ‘I was sold as a slave by my brothers’, ‘I was a victim of a society siren’.

Is all this so far from the story that preoccupied us recently about the violence of a man who, on release from Durham  prison,  sought revenge and shot people who had hurt him? We are rightly horrified by what happened, but if we unpick the two stories at the heart of both is – to quote the gunman  – ‘the loss of everything’ coupled with perceived betrayal. However  appalled we are by what he did, the fact is that this is one possible human response in a situation when a young man feels the world is against him.

What would you do in Joseph’s situation? At the very least I’d be angry and feel badly treated and would probably nurse my grievance to myself. What did Joseph do? According to the bit of the story just before the part we heard, far from lashing out in violence, he proved himself to be so reliable that the chief jailer committed all the prisoners to his care.  Some time later when two of his fellow prisoners had unusual dreams, he was the person to whom they turned. How different to the other tragic story. Joseph must have learned something from somewhere about how to live under duress.

He had been let down not only by his brothers, although to be fair to them he sounds like a very obnoxious little brother, and by Potiphar’s wife, but also by his fellow prisoner, for whom he had interpreted a dream. When Joseph did so and the man was restored to his position as Pharaoh’s chief cup bearer, Jospeh asked him to put in a word for him with Pharaoh to get him released. But as we heard, the cup bearer promptly forgot and another two years passed. Then Pharaoh had his troubling dreams and the cup-bearer remembered Joseph.  That’s where we joined in. If we read on we will hear that Pharaoh likes Joseph’s suggestion that they should stockpile food during the years of prosperity and puts Joseph, now aged 30, in charge of the arrangements. And if we were to read on still further, we come to the wonderfully told story of how his brothers come to him for food but have no idea who he is, and how he plays identity games with them until he has the upper hand and has them begging for mercy. So, unwittingly, they fulfil the dreams he had as a child but bowing down to him. Then he reveals who he is and there is an emotional family reunion which ends with them bringing their father, Jacob, to Egypt thus setting up their eventual enslavement which will need God’s deliverance through Moses.

That’s the story: what is there in it for us?

For that answer, I want to take you to Psalm 105,a Morning Prayer psalm that the choir have not sung regularly at Evensong.

When he summoned famine against the land,
   and broke every staff of bread,
¹⁷ he had sent a man ahead of them,
   Joseph, who was sold as a slave.
¹⁸ His feet were hurt with fetters,
   his neck was put in a collar of iron;
¹⁹ until what he had said came to pass,
   the word of the Lord kept testing him.
²⁰ The king sent and released him;
   the ruler of the peoples set him free.
²¹ He made him lord of his house,
   and ruler of all his possessions,
²² to instruct his officials at his pleasure,
   and to teach his elders wisdom.

The phrase I’m interested in is: “Until what he had said came to pass, the word of the Lord kept testing him.” Joseph was tested not only by his circumstances – slavery, unjust imprisonment, being betrayed by people he trusted - but by the word of the Lord. Now what was that word? It was not the written bible – that didn’t exist. So it has to be what he had heard about God from his family – the stories of great grandfather Abraham’s call to leave his home in Ur and travel as a nomad to an unknown land, the stories of grandfather Isaac and of his father Jacob and uncle Esau, who were at daggers drawn for most of their lives. And the dreams he had as a child which very tactlessly he had paraded in front of his jealous brothers. In those stories and events, the word of the Lord was to be heard and in the thirteen years between his brothers selling him into slavery and Pharaoh giving him authority in Egypt, the word of the Lord kept testing him. I can’t imagine he ever forgot his past and tried to make sense of that in relation to his present circumstances. How could it all go so badly wrong? How could what he believed as a child fit with what he experienced now as a young man? In short – the age-old questions that transcend the centuries and re-appear in each of our lives at one time or another through our own particular circumstances: where is God in all this? Could he continue to believe in the God his family had taught him about, the God who had done such remarkable things for his great-grandfather? Or had God forgotten him and written him off? “Until what he had said came to pass, the word of the Lord kept testing him.”

On this day when the choir year ends: choristers and gentlemen of the choir, members of the congregation, if you have not yet faced those questions of God when things go badly wrong, sooner or later you will – perhaps not as dramatically as Joseph did, but you will face them nonetheless. Some of you may be going through this now and can tell us very present stories about it. It is so much easier if we don’t believe in God or if we believe in a heartless God who doesn’t care, because then we write God’s love and care out of the equation. But as Christians we have to reckon with the goodness and love of God, and therefore like Joseph we have to let the word of God test us in the hard times, and engage vigorously with God in prayer about it.

So, to those who leave the choir today - Isaac, Liam, Matthew, Niall, Jonny, Jonathan, Alastair: you will take with you the word of the Lord that you have sung here, day after day, until it is fixed in your memory and rings in your ears. You leave with a legacy of the word of God that few people of your age have. What will you do with it? How will it guide you and perhaps test you? Rejoice in God through the music you remember, but also, when times are hard, draw on it, engage with God through it, sing the word of God back to yourself, live into it. Whatever happens, remember Joseph ‘”Until what he had said came to pass, the word of the Lord kept testing him.” And remember the words of today’s anthem, “O taste and see how gracious the Lord is: blest is the man that trusteth in him.” Within those words are both a promise of God’s faithfulness and assurance of God’s presence with you at all times. So, go from here singing, as you have sung week by week and sang so powerfully this morning, “O Lord in thee have I trusted. Let me never be confounded.”

Go in peace, to love and serve the Lord. Amen.

Genesis 41:1-16, 25-37; 1 Corinthians 4:8-13, Psalm 81