Open to Not Having All the Answers

Genesis 39: 13-23, page 30
When she saw that he had left his cloak in her hand and had run out of the house, she called her household servants. “Look,” she said to them, “this Hebrew has been brought to us to make sport of us! He came in here to sleep with me, but I screamed. When he heard me scream for help, he left his cloak beside me and ran out of the house.”
She kept his cloak beside her until his master came home. Then she told him this story: “That Hebrew slave you brought us came to me to make sport of me. But as soon as I screamed for help, he left his cloak beside me and ran out of the house.”
When his master heard the story his wife told him, saying, “This is how your slave treated me,” he burned with anger. Joseph’s master took him and put him in prison, the place where the king’s prisoners were confined.
But while Joseph was there in the prison, the Lord was with him; he showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden. So the warden put Joseph in charge of all those held in the prison, and he was made responsible for all that was done there. The warden paid no attention to anything under Joseph’s care, because the Lord was with Joseph and gave him success in whatever he did.
Sermon
Beautiful women can get you into trouble – Just the other day I was reading the paper, and my eyes found a picture of actress Katie Heigl.
Actress Heigl shares Keys to success the headline read.
I thought to myself, what would these keys to success need to be other than to have blond hair and the perfect body?
“You have to be open to not having all the answers,” says star of Grey’s Anatomy.
On that same front page there was also an article on Gov. Mark Sanford – describing once again how his indiscretions with another beautiful woman had de-railed his hopes for a Presidential run.
And then we have Joseph – his life also seemingly de-railed because of a beautiful woman, but unlike Mark Sanford, Joseph didn’t do anything wrong.
In our passage from Genesis, he is not a guilty man claiming innocence, but an innocent man made a victim because of a likely story from a manipulating woman.
So, while it is often the case, this morning’s scripture lesson is not a moral lesson on how men must be strong in the face of beautiful women, but something else.
While there are plenty of times when Joseph deserved the punishment he got – thrown in the cistern by his brothers we say that bragging kid had it coming – here, the victim of unfair circumstances, Joseph gets a taste, not of his own just desserts, but of bitter unfairness.
How chaotic the world seems from this perspective of unfairness.
How out of wack the world seems when it is so unjust that everyone stands against you making you pay for a crime that you didn’t commit.
How horrible it is to pay for another person’s wrong doing.
It is a shame to admit that there are men who have been freed from death row after serving sentences, years of solitary confinement, for crimes they didn’t commit. In these instances we so often see the cruel realities of racism, where black men are judged guilty, not according to evidence but according to skin color.
It’s a reality we don’t pay much attention to because it’s just too hard to face – but in this story about Joseph’s unfair conviction what can’t be denied is that it is a passage describing injustice and unfairness, causing the reader to wonder, how once the victim of such unfairness could Joseph not grow cold to the world, give up, waste away in his cell.
How many nights do you think he lay awake asking, “why God why. I thought you had a plan for me, and this cannot have been that plan.”
“You have to be open to not having all the answers,” Katie Higel says.[1]
And I believe that she is exactly right.
All God gave Joseph was a destination – a dream that showed him something amazing, his 11 brothers bowing down to him in the form of sheaves of grain – but God gave Joseph the destination, not a road map of how he would get there.
And here lies our temptation – as having a destination doesn’t stop me from planning out in my head my life story – how God will get me from point A to point B.
I see certain things unfold in certain ways: standing on the stage at graduation who doesn’t look out seeing a clear path towards success, wealth, and happiness.
Standing and looking out at friends and family on your wedding day, who doesn’t expect to walk down an aisle of rose petals and out into years of happiness, growing old together?
Standing in the Dr’s office with a pregnant belly who doesn’t imagine a perfect birth, a healthy baby, and years of laughter and joy, years of growing into a family together? Standing there tending the flocks with his brothers in the land of Canaan and dreaming dreams. Joseph must have imagined, if not a smooth path, at least a direct path to making his dream a reality.
While looking out from these high places the path seems easy – the path meets a dead-end from the perspective of a prison cell – and left alone in that prison cell I don’t think anyone would ever blame him if he started to give up on that dream.
Who could possible blame him if he looked out from his prison cell and no longer believed he would make it?
No one would blame him; no, no one would blame him because we have all been in his shoes.
Steadily on the path towards our career we are rejected from graduate school and suddenly, with the wind taken out of our sails, loose direction and start dreaming smaller dreams.
Settling down into a happy retirement, health fails, savings crumble and the secure future of growing old together seems so far away. The dream put in the works so many years ago seems like it will remain nothing more than a dream.
On track for the perfect family, a pregnancy ends in miscarriage or infertility strikes, and we’re suddenly unable to do the thing we never even questioned we’d be able to do. A pit replaces dreams of a full belly.
Having found the perfect partner, fulfilled by another person, out of no where we find out that everything is not what we though it was, that we were living a lie, that counseling, separation, or even divorce, are now real and possibly necessary options.
To save ourselves from the pain of it – little by little we give up on reaching the destination by saying things like, “I never really wanted it to work out any way.”
Or, “That dream wasn’t really a dream, more the effect of indigestion then divine intervention. God doesn’t really have great things in store, I’m just Joe, and I’ll learn to be satisfied with something less than happiness.”
So it is the unfairness of life that works to dissuade us of our dreams.
Looking out on the world from the jail cell, looking out on the future from disappointment, just laid-off, just broken-up, just rejected, looking at life from the perspective of miscarriage, death, unemployment, debt, disease, adultery, divorce, or depression. But Joseph, the victim of unfair circumstance, still had the power to choose between two options – the option to give up, to give up on God, to give up on faith, to give up on justice, to give up on hope – or to believe according to the words of the prophet: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
You see, Joseph, even at the mercy of powers bigger and stronger then he still had two options – to curse God and rot away in his prison cell, or to have faith in the God who promised a destination but left the road to that destination unclear.
We were never promised a road map, but we have our destination.
To get to this Promised Land we must keep the faith that we will get there, ready to serve where ever we find ourselves, always open to not having all the answers.
[1] The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Thursday, July 02, 2009