Rev. Rachel Lewis Cooley
“Walk Whatever Road’s at Your Feet”
Eastwood Christian Church, Nashville TN
September 13, 2020
Hello Eastwood Christian Church! I’m so grateful to be with you now – whenever and wherever you’re watching this, in Nashville or elsewhere – and to see you tonight at our Vespers Service. Hello also to the folks of St. John’s United Church of Christ in Germantown OH wherever YOU are this Sunday. I’m honored to be preaching for both of these two amazing congregations today, and am grateful for this moment to remember that each congregation and each Christian is connected to a greater whole.
In some of her work discussing how children connect to the bible, Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso tells about a time a teacher in a synagogue class for children came to her with a list of questions (how’s, where’s, and why’s about God) the children had hit her with. She was stressing out at the number of questions and her fears she couldn’t answer them. Rabbi Sasso agreed to come back to the class with her to help, but says she didn’t know what she was going to do either. When she got there, though, she realized that maybe the children didn’t need all their questions answered one by one, which might even dull their wondering and awe, they just needed a story. She told a story then, with characters and themes, and asked them “I wonder” questions. “I wonder what parts of this story are most important to you? I wonder where you are in the story?” she asked them, and they discussed it together. These “I wonder” questions might sound particularly familiar to you at St. John’s, as I know y’all use the Godly Play curriculum and I’ve had the pleasure at watching some of your videos of it for your worship.
Today we’re looking at the tail end of the story of Joseph and his brothers in Genesis. This story was in the lectionary this week, and I’m wondering what it might say to us, right now. I’ll bring some of my wonderings to life in this sermon, but I hope you’ll wonder and discuss too. You may know the rest of the story about Joseph, or you may not. Maybe you know the 1990’s children’s movie Joseph King of Dreams. I listened to the soundtrack for it this week – and that will come up later – and I have to say my no-longer-8-years-old self still highly recommends it. Or maybe your choice is the upbeat 1960’s musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber. However you know the story, or if you do or not, consider this an invitation to dive into the rest of the Joseph story this week if you like. And if you’d like to jump into a different story, or are already reading a book or identifying with another character in your life, awesome. Wondering about and seeing ourselves in stories is a fundamental part of our being human, and I invite you to embrace that this week.
Let’s hear now our snippet of the story about Joseph and his brothers. Our reading takes place after the brothers betrayed Joseph and sold him into slavery, after Joseph rose to prominence in Pharaoh’s court by interpreting dreams and helping Egypt prepare for the coming famine, after the brothers had all been brought back together, and after Joseph’s brothers and the whole family moved down toward Egypt. Our piece begins just after Jacob their father has died. Let’s hear now from Genesis 50, verses 15-21 in the Common English Bible translation:
Joseph and his brothers in Egypt
15 When Joseph’s brothers realized that their father was now dead, they said, “What if Joseph bears a grudge against us, and wants to pay us back seriously for all of the terrible things we did to him?” 16 So they approached Joseph and said, “Your father gave orders before he died, telling us, 17 ‘This is what you should say to Joseph. “Please, forgive your brothers’ sins and misdeeds, for they did terrible things to you. Now, please forgive the sins of the servants of your father’s God.”’” Joseph wept when they spoke to him.
18 His brothers wept too, fell down in front of him, and said, “We’re here as your slaves.”
19 But Joseph said to them, “Don’t be afraid. Am I God? 20 You planned something bad for me, but God produced something good from it, in order to save the lives of many people, just as he’s doing today. 21 Now, don’t be afraid. I will take care of you and your children.” So he put them at ease and spoke reassuringly to them.
Will you pray with me?
Creator God, may the meditations and wonderings of all of our hearts, and the words of my mouth, be faithful to you and fruitful for your work in the kin-dom.
Amen.
Joseph and the brothers have come to a new moment of questions and uncertainty. Their father has just died, and it feels to me like the brothers are almost waiting for the next shoe to drop, the next hardship and challenge to deal with. They've faced famine, leaving their home, and now the death of their father, not to mention the family drama bringing guilt at their betraying Joseph, confusion in the tests of loyalty he put them through with the golden cup, and awe at finding him alive. It’s no surprise they may be feeling anxious, saying “What if?!,” and wondering what on earth could come next.
I wonder… if 2020 sort of feels like this to some of us? …
So it seems they bring all their anxiety to Joseph, needing to find forgiveness, reassurance, and love. They say “please forgive your brothers, please forgive the servants of your father’s God.” I wonder why they frame it that way “the servants of your father’s God”… is it something about appealing to their common humanity and interconnection? Is it that they’re thinking about God and really wondering how could all that’s happened to us happen to faithful servants of God? I wonder if we might relate to their question asking?
Joseph seems to take it as though they’re coming to him like he is God. Let’s be clear, Joseph has a bit of a tendency toward power trips, what with his dream-reading and current position in Egypt, not to mention the implied story he might have heard because his mother was unable to have children before him that he is a miracle child. It may not be surprising, then, if he felt the weight of their questions as though he was a leader who had to have all the answers.
I wonder why he weeps, immediately falling down in front of his brothers in tears? Maybe he had his own deep, aching questions like his brothers. He surely had asked himself over the years why things unfolded as they did for him. Maybe he saw himself in their want for answers, knew the feeling, and felt it more acutely seeing it reflected back to him. So he weeps, and they weep together. They share in pain and uncertainty together, all of them wondering why things had happened the way they did, and what might come next. I wonder if you’ve experienced this, talking to someone recently?
Maybe you've even had someone look to you for answers, someone in a moment of pain, a child looking to you, a faith question posed in conversation. Joseph surely wants to be able to give answers, but doesn’t know any for certain. Perhaps he weeps that he’s unable to fully calm their fears with answers. Realizing he can’t, he also steps down from any hero, all-knowing, leader pedestal he or they might put him on. If he can’t give them what they want, then what is he to do? What opportunity does the moment hold for him? What opportunity does our moment hold? How can we respond to the questions we’re asked, or the longing we have for answers ourselves?
Surely we will have to hold the questions together. The brothers and Joseph share in weeping, and I believe they must have felt better having allowed their feelings to flow, and they were only able to do so together. Maybe Joseph felt his feelings more deeply from seeing theirs, and they were then surprised to see him weep too. They got caught up in empathy and shared feeling.
Only after he weeps with his brothers and steps down from any implied pedestal is Joseph able to respond with the best answer he knows how to give. I’m guessing he’d made a habit of turning to this answer throughout his journey, and he says it this way in our story: “the world planned something bad for me, but God produced something good from it, in order to save the lives of many people, just as God is doing today.” Life had taught him that things are difficult along the way, and you never know what may be ahead, but maybe some of it will be for the good. He handled challenge and pain on many occasions. His brothers and others around them and allllll of our ancestors did too. You and I are doing it now. We’ve walked through challenge before, and we’ll do it again. Remember the challenges you’ve walked through. Some of your challenges this season no doubt look similar in some ways to those you’ve faced before, and different in others. But you have shown strength before, your faith community has shown strength before, and you will again.
Joseph didn’t know where his path would go as he walked it, but he tried to walk it in faith, and to do his best along the way. We see him try to give the best answer he can to his brothers in this story. He has learned how to do the best he can before, and he’ll do it again. He’s made a habit of “walking whatever road was at his feet,” as Joseph, King of Dreams -that 90’s kids’ version of the story - puts it in song. “You’ve got to walk whatever road’s at your feet, you've got to make whatever progress you can,” the song says. “Although the map you hold is far from complete, you’ve got to take whatever road’s at your feet.”
Joseph didn’t know this moment was coming, where he’d be asked for answers by his family. But I wonder if in processing his feelings with his brothers and then offering words of comfort, he felt more assured too, and his faith roots grew ever-deeper. Even if he and his brothers didn’t know all the answers, they knew they were part of something bigger, and this sense of interconnection brought them comfort. He and his brothers were connected to each other and to others, who faced the famine, walked with whatever strength they could muster through challenge, wept together, and otherwise walked the road at their feet as best as they could. They looked back to see that one person’s journey can have far-reaching impacts and that each of them played a role in the story.
I wonder what remembering that each of us has a part in the story could mean for us today. It might have profound implications for the respect we give to our own voice, remembering that it is our responsibility in faith to meet the challenges in front of us and refuse to deny or give away our ability to act. Maybe we could empower the voices of others around us, living out our recognition that we need each other, and we need each and every one of us to “come alive,” as theologian Howard Thurman puts it, “because the world needs people who have come alive.” This would involve taking seriously when we need to stop talking for a moment to listen to someone else too. And if we want everyone to be able to come alive, and do their best, we need to work for equal access to good education and healthcare and resources too. “Walk whatever road is at your feet” does not mean we do nothing to help each other. We can identify what others needed to best walk, and do what we can to get it to them. In doing so, we trust and honor that each of us is doing the best we can, and remember how others have helped us to do our best. Joseph reassures his brothers, “I will take care of you and your children” and he does so by providing resources he accesses. We must do the best we can not just by ourselves, but by others as well, trusting they will do the same for us and that the story includes all of us. We each have a role to play, and the amazing and important part is that we impact others and they impact us too. We do not journey alone, and we do not do all the work alone either. And if we need to weep with one another at the challenges sometimes, we must do that so we can best meet the road ahead.
That’s just my read of the story this week. I wonder, what is yours? I wonder what you may be thinking? I invite you to check in with yourself, and share in conversation about this and other stories that help encourage us and deepen our faith as we walk together.
May it be so. Amen.