Shane Hughes 8-9-26

Good morning, Highland. My name is Shane Hughes. I'm one of the preacher ministers here and one of the many preachers here, actually. And I'm delighted to be with you here today. We have been walking kind of slowly in an interrupted way this summer, kind of through the stories of the patriarchs, of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob.

And now today we're going to look at Joseph. And I want you to notice something, that each of these individuals have a different relationship and a different crisis in their life and in relation to God. For Abraham, the question is, is he going to believe that God will do what God says God will do because God said, I'm going to give you a child. The problem is he is very old and so is his wife Sarah. And children are way past.

That's long been set in the horizon. Can God keep his promise? And everything after that moment in the story of Abraham is Abraham and others around him putting the covenant in question? Will Abraham have a child or will it be through Hagar Ishmael? Will it be through Pharaoh or Abimelech or all of these other people that kind of show up in the way?

And Abraham's unfaithfulness as he pursues God's promise reveals the covenant nature of God. And I think there's a gospel story there, and maybe you can relate to that. Maybe you felt sometimes like despite everything that you do in your life, God has remained faithful to you. Despite difficult decisions or bad judgment or whatever you want to call it, sin. God is still showing up for you.

And that's the truth. You live. And then there's Isaac. I think it's interesting that the way that Isaac most commonly refers to the God of his father Abraham is the fear. And if you read the book of Genesis, you know why Isaac calls him that.

And Isaac doesn't have a lot of personal interaction with God. And frankly, I don't blame him. But he does trust and rely on what God says. Because when he finds. When it's time to find a wife for his sons, he says to his servant, God will show you God's going to do what God said God would do.

And I think there's a place in our lives, times in our lives, or maybe that's where you identify right now, is that maybe God just seems a little bit scary. But the gospel according to Isaac is that you can trust God to keep his promise. And then we looked at Jacob last week. Jacob, who wrestles with God. Jacob who's always striving to get the upper hand.

Jacob, who Never seems to have enough, but always just wants to end up on top. And Jacob and God shows up in Jacob's life as well, as a challenger, as a wrestler in the dark. And Jacob leaves that encounter walking with limp. And I found that in my life where I have struggled with the questions of God, I've wrestled with the presence of God. And there's a gospel there, There's a gospel of the truth, of a God who will keep his promises, a God that's big enough to handle your biggest critique, a God that can absorb those kind of feelings and statements and remain sovereign.

And today we're going to look at Joseph. And Joseph is a difficult story because it's like. It's like 15, 13 chapters long in Genesis, but it'll only take you about 20 minutes to read it. So if you've never heard the story of Joseph before, you. You can pick it up your Bible this afternoon, read it in Genesis, chapter 38.

But I'm going to rely that we at least have a vague kind of sense of the story of Joseph because I don't have time to tell the whole story today. But the reality is that Joseph has grown up in a family that is extraordinarily dysfunctional. I don't know if you've ever seen the picture of, like Mount St. Helens before 1980. It's a beautiful mountain. It's gorgeous trees everywhere.

Then there was the eruption. It was the largest volcanic eruption in North America in some time. And now Mount St. Helens is cratered. It's got the whole half of it just blew up into the sky. Because underneath that beautiful mountain with verdant trees was a problem brewing.

And there has been a problem brewing in Joseph's family. Generationally, Joseph is in a broken family system and acts foolishly at best, Joseph himself, and sinful at worst. And some of it's not his fault. You know, his father, Jacob, makes him the favorite and he grows up in a system where his older brother, this is Jacob, not Joseph, Jacob grows up in an older system which. Where his older brother was clearly favored and he wants to balance the scales in his own family.

But it's also because he loves Rebekah and he was tricked into marrying Leah by his cunning uncle. And Joseph is her first son. And so Joseph is given nicer clothes and he gets more attention. I mean, even careful parents, even with careful parents, siblings have this, like, keen sense of who is getting more love or more time or more favor. And you all know which sibling of yours got the extra stuff, right?

Wasn't me, I'll tell you that much.

And sometimes even despite best intentions, but sometimes I think it's intentional. My grandmother, my mother's mother, thought that my eldest sister was my mom's favorite. And so my second older sister Cheryl, whenever we went to Indiana to visit my grandma, she got a present because my grandma thought, well, she's obviously, you know, the less loved child. So I'm going to make up for it. Meanwhile, I'm just sitting here asking the question, how come grandma loves Cheryl and nobody else?

Right? That wasn't any fun. But then in the story of Joseph, and I'm beginning in Genesis 38, there's all of these like, mishaps and timing that exists in the story. Remember, he shows up with his coat and he tells his brothers his dreams about, hey, you're all going to be worshiping me. Even dad's going to be bowing down to me.

They didn't take that well and they want to kill him. And so he shows up and Reuben, his oldest brother, who probably already has a family of his own by this point, is there. And so his brothers don't just kill him. But then Reuben's not there when his brothers decide to sell him into slavery. Reuben, I want you to just understand the timing here.

If Reuben's too late on the first time, then Joseph is dead. If Reuben is present for the second time, then Joseph just goes home to his father and they have to work it out. But Joseph is sold to slavers and ends up in Egypt and he is away from his kin. And I want you to realize we miss this because we're from the west and most of us imagine that we're going to grow up and get a job. And that probably means we have to move to Dallas or to Austin or to somewhere else to pursue our careers.

But in the ancient Near East, a child leaving home without going somewhere else, where there is family is disaster. I want you to remember in the story of the prodigal son, the. The problem is not that the younger son wastes his money. The problem is that he is in a land where there is a famine and he has no people. That's the crisis in the story.

Joseph is in Egypt and he has no people there. And he's sold into the house of Potiphar. And he rises in position and authority only ended up in this compromise moment with the boss's wife and. And he's sent to prison. And there he meets the cupbearer and the baker of Pharaoh and is able to interpret their dreams, which predict reality.

And after he does so and it comes true, it's promptly forgotten and he's left to rot for a while in prison.

I want us to pause here because I want us to remember that waiting seasons are not wasted seasons.

They're where integrity is refined and wisdom is formed and leadership is tested. That sometimes what appears to be delay is often alignment, because God will not elevate what cannot yet sustain the weight of purpose. But then he's remembered and he's eventually placed as second in command of all of Egypt. And then there comes seven years of plenty, which he predicted from a dream. And then seven years of famine, which he also predicted from Pharaoh's dream.

And Egypt grows incredibly powerful in this time. And you ask the question why? Well, it's because Joseph was prepared. He was able to manage the logistics of the empire's grain stock. He was able to delegate and create, excuse me, vision for those under him to carry out those ideas.

He was able to time the market. And it's very tempting to make that the moral of this story, about how pluck and intelligence and hard working can make you be successful. But I don't think that this is what Genesis is trying to say about God. I don't think that's the gospel. In this story, if you just are smart enough and handsome enough and successful enough and you work hard enough, then you'll be important.

All the while that the famine is happening, his brothers have ate their last grain and they come to Egypt because that's the only place to get food. They come to buy food. They don't know it's Joseph. Maybe it's because the way he's dressed or because he was so far out and gone that they don't. He's out of mind.

But then through some hijinks, and it's kind of fun to read that part of the story, Joseph reveals himself. And. And the most powerful theological statement is in Genesis chapter 50. And this is where he says, you intended to harm me, but God intended it for good, to accomplish what is now being done, the savings of many lives. So then don't be afraid.

What we have to understand is that the point of this story is not how Joseph saves the world. How Joseph saves the world is merely like a byproduct. It's a fortunate byproduct of God's intent from the very beginning is working to reconcile this family. That the family of Jacob remained together and solid is more important than saving the lives of everyone that lives in Egypt to bring the family together. Because God's intent and God's vision from the very beginning was to make this family a people who would be the light, the world.

And you gotta ask the question, like, why didn't God just do this a different way? Like I could imagine In Genesis chapter 8 a very well timed and placed angel that just kind of shows up, right, and just says a few things and it solves the problem. In fact, have you ever seen Touched by an Angel? We sing Shout to the Lord. That was like a throwback touch to the angel, maybe even a deeper throwback.

I think it was on ABC in like the 90s. And it was about this angel that spoke to people. That's basically the premise of the show. That was really it. It was 44 minutes and the first like 42 minutes is people creating a problem that just seems unintractable.

Like it's going to be a problem, they're never going to work it out. But in the last minute, this angel shows up, she kind of glows and she says like a two minute sermon speech and then everything works out. It would all be made right. So why didn't an angel just show up and tell everyone, Joseph, you're kind of being a spoiled brat. Brothers, you're about to commit murder.

Maybe you stop Jacob, you need to deal with your daddy issues. Take some therapy. Like why didn't an angel say it? Because then everyone would repent and shake hands and hug it out and it would all work out. And I gotta tell you, in the last 20 years of doing ministry, I have tried to be that angel.

It does not work like the TV show. Never in the history of calm down has anyone ever calmed down.

And I think God knows this.

I think God knows the truth. And that's why in this situation God doesn't send an angel. And this is how you know the Bible is real. Because people don't transform when they are told. They are awful.

People transform when they experience discomfort. And even sometimes then they don't change.

But it is interesting how God is silent in this story. You know, God does not speak to Joseph the way that he drew Abraham into the chill of the night and pointed his eyes up to the stars, sent messengers and so forth. God doesn't show up in the pit or the prison for Joseph to wrestle and then bless like he does for Jacob. God has no asides in the text like he does in the story of Noah where he ponders exactly what can these humans do.

God shows up. And maybe this is the only place God shows up. The competence and the character and the gifting of Joseph. There's no burning bush. There's no angel at the gate.

It's just doors opening and closing and a young man left to guess what it all means. And if competence means showing up on schedule and explaining yourself before things get unbearable, then by that standard, God fails Joseph again and again. And here's the real weight behind the question. Silence read as incompetence or hiddenness read as absence. And I think this is a question that deserves to be taken seriously and not explained way too fast.

And the reason why I think that is the case is because most of us in our lives, I would argue nearly everyone in this room has experienced silence and distance, and they don't understand why.

But watch what the story, what the narrator, the storyteller, keeps doing. Instead, in Potterford's house and again in the prison cell, the text stops to tell it plainly. The Lord was with Joseph. The Lord was kind to Joseph. God isn't missing from the story.

God is missing from Joseph's hearing. The silence is real, but so is the presence of. They're not contradictions. They're two vantage points on one story. Only one of them belongs to Joseph while he's living it.

And that's the oldest Christian instinct for reading this text. Tertullian, who was a theologian, he was about 200 years after Christ, he already saw Joseph as a shadow of Christ cast forward, a man sold into Egypt on account of the favor of God, not despite the favor of God. The favor of God was inside the misfortune the whole time, working at a depth that misfortune could never touch.

His brothers sell him into slavery in a city called Dothan. And this isn't the last time we see Dothan in the text, because the second time is a story where Elisha the prophet, and he is there. And the city of Dothan is surrounded by, encamped on every side by enemies. And Elisha prays that he could see. And then God reveals the hills are full of horses and chariots of fire.

So why didn't God just do that?

And I think the reason is, is there are greater things at stake in this story than slavery or prison or exile. Much greater.

Another way to say it is there are greater things at stake in this world than our individual happiness or comfort. And that may be a hard truth for us to realize in a Western culture that seems kind of just, engineered and designed to provide comfort and safety and happiness at a moment's notice, at the touch of an app, at least a facsimile of those things.

Here's, here's my last reflection on this text. Although we are all, I think, short and slow, I love that communion thought. I also think there are a lot of Josephs here in this church. I mean, have you ever been to a church where someone is not an expert at everything? Like, I cannot tell a story without someone in this church coming up to me and saying, well actually if you read it in the Greek or you know, like there's just, there's just a million brilliant historians and theologians and scripture tellers and bankers and people that know how to do social justice.

And I mean this place is brilliant. There are Joseph's all over the place. And I want to be clear. This, this is, we are not Joseph. This story is not about us.

But there are also like a genuinely a lot of brilliant people in this room. And it's a little bit intimidating honestly, because you guys keep me on my toes. But this has been like kind of the story of my career. I used to work in Silicon Valley in San Jose, California and in my church was the lead engineer of the Solid State Drive. And that's probably the thing that's sitting in your phone and in your computer.

He designed it. His name is on the patent. There was an elder there who had most of the New Testament memorized. Not like, hey, I looked it up for a talk and had to remember it like memorized in the way you know your own name.

There was a man there, a guy there named Keith. And the first time I met him, he handed me his business card because there was an Easter egg in his business card. If you looked carefully. He worked for Apple. And so it had his name, Keith.

And then it had Apple Computing, it had his position and then it had his email. There was no phone number on his business card because he wanted you to notice the email. The email was kapple.com now if you've ever tried to open up a new Gmail account and you know that you have to add numbers, you and capitalizations and emoticons, you know how difficult it is, what a flex it is to have an email kapple.com and the reason why is because he wrote the email program when Apple was starting it. The reason that your iPhone is not on fire in your pocket right now is because of the algorithm that he wrote. He's brilliant.

Somebody else who worked for Ford and figured out how to make the little the clicker on your keyboard unlock your car door and not of the hundred million other cars in the parking lot. That guy was at that church, that room.

And that was the room I used to stand in front of brilliant minds one week after another, just like this room. But here's the truth that I've learned getting to love people like that up close. Brilliance does not equal formation.

And here's what you realize when you go back and you read Joseph's story slowly. The text spends 13 chapters on this man, and never once does it stop to admire his intelligence. It doesn't linger on his dream interpreting powers. He just goes about almost matter of factly, two verses done. What it lingers on is the cistern, a coat he doesn't get to keep, A woman's hand closing around his cloak in an empty house, and him choosing, with nobody watching, nothing to lose but his own advantage to run.

It lingers on that for years, actual years, where nothing happened and nobody promoted him. And he kept showing up anyway. That's the material that scripture cares about. It's not the resume, it's the formation.

Which means that brilliance was never part of the qualification. It was the delivery mechanism. God didn't need Joseph's genius to get Egypt through a famine. God could have used anyone sharp enough to read a spreadsheet and to plan ahead. What the story actually holds its breath for is the man who has been betrayed that badly and someone who won't spend his power getting even.

That's the part that took 13 chapters. That's the part that can't be fast tracked by talent. So if you're one of the brilliant ones in this room, and like I said, I think most of you are, I want you to hear this as love, not indictment. But what I need you to hear today is that your gifts and talents and. And hard work got you where you are, but they will not, on their own, help you achieve formation.

That part still happens the slow way, as it happens to all of us. The slow way in the years where nobody's applauding, doing the small, unglamorous, unrewarding thing that's right in front of you. Brilliance can build you an empire, but it has never once, on its own, built you a soul.

Frederick Buechner said, almost as much as it is the story of how Israel was saved from famine and extinction. It's the story of how Joseph was saved as a human being. And it would be interesting to know, he continues, which of these two achievements cost God the greater effort and which was the one he was the most proud.

And it's easy to mistake more often than anything else. That line in this book, that powerful theological claim for. For good news, cheaply bought, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. And I promise you, if you say it fast enough, say it to someone that's freshly grieving. It sounds like a magic trick, like God reached out and swapped out the poison, poison for the medicine while nobody was looking and everybody should feel fine.

But Joseph does not say this on the day his brothers strip him of his coat and stand at the edge of the pit deciding whether to kill him or sell him. It does not say it in Potiphar's house, whether in the prison or the two long years he's forgotten by the cupbearer. It says that at the very end, it's an old man looking backward across nearly 40 years at Brothers who are still technically guilty. The evil does not stop being evil.

Joseph never tells his brothers it didn't happen, or that it didn't hurt, or that they didn't mean it. He names their intention plainly. You meant this for evil. It's the way you name a scar. Not to reopen it, but because pretending it isn't there is its own kind of lie.

So what changes is not the past. What changes is how the past is now permitted, what the past is now permitted to mean. It changes how we allow our past to tell the story of our future. And that's not the same thing as saying God needed the brothers cruelty to get Joseph to Egypt, as if Providence needed the plot of a villain to make the good. As if God were up in the rafters of a theater, somehow directing betrayal like stage props.

The text doesn't let us go that far, and so neither should we. God does not manufacture evil in order to manufacture good. What the text says more carefully is that God works in the field God is actually given. God works in real human freedom. God works in real malice.

God works through real grief and refuses let those have the last word. And that is a much smaller claim than everything happens for a reason. But it's also a much sturdier one. It doesn't require you to find the reason. It only asks you to trust that reason isn't the only thing strong enough to hold a life together, which may be why it takes Joseph so long to say it.

You can't arrive at God meant it for good in some sort of shortcut. You can't say it over someone else in the pit while they're still in it, because that isn't testimony. That's trespassing. That's a sentence that only can be spoken from the far side of something hard by a person who survived it, about their own wound and in their own timeline. Anyone else saying it on your behalf is not preaching the gospel.

They're just refusing to sit with you in the dark.

So if this text is good news, and I think the story of Joseph is good news, it's a good news of a particularly patient kind. Not that the pit was secretly fine all along, but the pit is never going to be the end of the story that God is telling, whether it's the end of yours. Yet only you get to say. Only you get to choose how you tell your story of the work of God in your life. But the good news is, is that you are the one that gets to tell it.

God has moved in your world and in your life and in your family and in all of the ways that there is muck and pit and prison and loss to allow you to tell the story of God's grace to the world. We get to tell that story. Would you please stand for our benediction?

Dear friends, in this room, I know that there are some of you that are in the pit right now. There are some that feel like they are in prison. I also know that there are some of us that feel like we are second in command and in charge of the world. So wherever you are at, know that while your story is your own, your story is the vehicle for God's telling. Your story is the vehicle for God's gospel so that we might share it with the world.

So this week, be bold in the way that you share your story with those you love. Go in peace.