Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany, February 23, 2025

Genesis 43:3-11, 15+Psalm 37:1-12, 41-42+
1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50+Luke 6:27-38

The Book of Genesis is fifty chapters long. Fully half of these chapters tells the story of Jacob the patriarch, the father of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, from the time he cheats his brother Esau out of his birthright and blessing and sets out to find himself a wife. These chapters are filled with sibling rivalry, violence, intrigue, love, hate, forgiveness, and reconciliation. In short, the story of Jacob and his children is one in which we can see ourselves. It is the story of a family, warts and all.

We dip our toe in this story this morning toward the end. For those of you who have not seen enough versions of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the plot goes like this: Joseph was the favored son of Jacob, born of his beloved wife Rachel. Because he is favored, and also because he has dreams that portend his dominance over his ten older brothers and doesn’t have the good sense to keep that to himself, his brothers can't stand him and sell him into slavery. He finds himself enslaved in Egypt, lands in prison, uses his dream interpretation skills to get himself released, is brought into Pharaoh’s court and becomes the most powerful man in Egypt after Pharaoh. There's a famine throughout the region which Joseph saw coming and had prepared the people of Egypt by storing enough grain to last, but his older brothers come down to Egypt looking for grain. It's been a couple of decades, the brothers think young Joseph is dead, so they do not recognize him looking like an Egyptian official. We pick up today with Joseph revealing himself to his brothers.

I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life.  For the famine has been in the land these two years, and there are five more years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest. God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here but God...(Genesis 45:4-8a)

I don't know about you, but I honestly can't say that I would have reacted the way Joseph did. I mean, they were going to leave me for dead in a cistern when I was just a kid but sold me into slavery instead? I may be sitting pretty now, but prison was no joke. Maybe I wouldn’t have let them starve, but this?

And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them; and after that his brothers talked with him. (Genesis 45:15)

Jesus said, "I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. (Luke 6:27)

It would appear that Jesus came by all of this honestly, although there is a difference. In fact, what Jesus has to say about loving your neighbors is universal in many faith and philosophical traditions. What is not so universal is the idea that we don’t just love our neighbors, we love our enemies. In the Joseph story, these were his brothers, and in Middle Eastern cultures, kinship ties run deep. What about those Ishmaelites or Midianites who actually transported him down to Egypt and sold him? I don't see Joseph weeping over them.

We often say that what made Jesus a different kind of Messiah was his alignment with those on the margins, the poor, the oppressed, the imprisoned ones. But this, what we read in Luke 6 today, is where the proverbial rubber meets the road. Sure, Joseph can love and forgive his brothers; they are family. It's easy for me to love those who love me, even if we don't always get along, but what credit is that to me, Jesus asks? Can I love someone who is actively working against my well-being or the health and welfare of those I serve? Can I love and pray for those who promote fascism and white supremacy? Can I see in them what Paul says I should see, that they  "also bear the image of the one of heaven" (1 Corinthians 15:49)?

In the three-part study of the parables of Jesus found in Luke that we finished last week, time and again, those parables highlight that God's reign is not like the reign of kings and princes. That God's economy rewards the weak and "undeserving" in equal if not greater measure to those who think they have "earned" God's blessing. Our job is not to judge, not to condemn, not to measure our own goodness and generosity. No, our job is to love. To forgive. Not just those near and dear to us, but maybe especially those we would rather not have to deal with at all.

When I think of this kind of forgiveness and love, I can't help thinking of the two distinctive acts of mercy in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, the book, the many film versions, and the musical. Towards the beginning, Jean Valjean steals silver from a kindly bishop who gave him shelter. Instead of turning him in to the authorities, the bishop lies and says he gave the silver to Valjean and, in addition, gives him the silver candlesticks that Valjean "forgot" to take with him. Jesus said, "Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you" (Luke 6:30). This act literally turns Valjean around, sets him on a new course.

Yet why did I allow that man
To touch my soul and teach me love?
He treated me like any other
He gave me his trust
He called me brother
My life he claims for God above
Can such things be?[1]

At the end of Les Mis, Valjean has the opportunity to kill the man who has been pursuing him for years to throw him back in prison, Inspector Javert, but he does not. At first Javert is angry, refusing to be indebted to a thief, and then he is bewildered, and then he realizes that the black and white justice he had always pursued was in error. That there is a law of love, a law of mercy, that is of infinitely greater value. He cannot live with such knowledge.

Love and forgiveness interrupt the usual order of things in this world. You want predictability about such matters? Jesus is going to upset your expectations. And here's the thing: every time we respond in love and forgiveness rather than hate and bitterness, we push the world a smidgen more toward what God's dream for us is. It isn’t just in fiction with people like Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert. In a 1957 sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Dr. Martin Luther King had this to say about loving your enemies:

Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. That’s why Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption. You just keep loving people and keep loving them, even though they’re mistreating you. Here’s the person who is a neighbor, and this person is doing something wrong to you and all of that. Just keep being friendly to that person. Keep loving them. Don’t do anything to embarrass them. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with bitterness because they’re mad because you love them like that. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.[2]

There is nothing that will change this world more than the power of love, the power of forgiveness. We have tried hate and division, and how's that working out for us? Jesus invites us to a better way: love your enemies, pray for those who hate us, forgive as many times as it takes, give without counting the cost. This is the invitation into a new way of living. Maybe if more of us say "yes," this weary world might begin to look more like heaven come to earth.

[1] https://thelesmisproject.wordpress.com/songs/the-bishops-gift/

[2] From a sermon, November 17, 1957, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama. Excerpted from Following the Call, from "A Knock At Midnight," ed. Clayborne Carson and Peter Holloran (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1998), 37-57