Good Out of Bad

Good Out of Bad

For Prospect UCC, Seattle

August 23, 2020

We aren’t exactly living in the best of times, are we. I mean, just consider how your church and so many others are doing worship these days. Somehow on line not in person. I’m grateful of course that we have the internet and can do worship this way. Back I the days before computers we probably wouldn’t be doing worship at all except maybe by radio, and there aren’t many radio preachers that I’d much care t listen to. There’s a pandemic going on. In our country alone over five million people have been infected by what they call a novel coronavirus that produces a disease syndrome called COVID-19. More than 170,000 Americans have died from it. Worldwide over twenty-three million people have been infected and over 800,000 have died. We’re not worshiping together in person because the state has told us not to but more fundamentally because we don’t want to spread the coronavirus among us. Of course the problem isn’t just that we can’t worship in person, though if you’re like me you certainly miss worshiping in person. We’re all staying isolated as much as we can. I haven’t seen my kids or grand-kids for over five months and may not see them for another year or more except on screen. Of course, I know that that is a small loss compared to the loss of those who have had loved ones die from COVID-19, but still. All of our lives have been disrupted, and they’re going to stay disrupted for quite a while yet.

The pandemic has also disrupted our economy. Tens of millions of Americans are now unemployed. An unknown but large number of small businesses have closed, many of them never to reopen. State governments, our own included, have lost so much revenue from loss of sales and other taxes that drastic cuts in services are inevitable. A great many Americans are facing eviction or foreclosure and may end up homeless. Grocery stores run short on items that used to be readily available. All in all the world today is in appallingly bad shape—and I won’t even mention our country’s political condition.

Here’s the thing though. God has surprising ways of bringing good out of bad. Take the story of Joseph that we just heard. He’s one of the twelve sons of Jacob. In parts of his story we didn’t hear this morning he’s an arrogant jerk toward his brothers. He tells them of dreams he’s had that suggest that though he’s one of the younger sons he will somehow lord it over the others. So they decide to kill him. Now, killing your brother, or anyone else for that matter, is a very bad thing, although Josephs’ brothers’ decision to kill him is at least somewhat understandable if not excusable given the way he had behaved toward them. On of them Reuben, convinces the others not to kill him right off but to throw him into a dry pit. Reuben, we’re told, intends to return later to rescue him. Then some passing traders come by. The brothers haul Joseph out of the pit and sell him into slavery. He ends up a slave in Egypt.

Yet somehow some good comes out of these evil actions by Joseph’s brothers. In another part of the story we didn’t hear he ends up in the house of pharaoh, where he becomes so powerful that he is essentially ruling Egypt. He predicts years of famine to come. Joseph stores up huge reserves of grain to get the people through the years of hunger that lie ahead. I once heard some Republican politician, Herman Cain if I recall correctly, say that the great pyramids of Egypt were Joseph’s grain elevators. Really. Go figure.

Famine strikes back in Canaan where Joseph came from too. His brothers come to Egypt to find food. They end up appearing before Joseph. As far as they know he’s just this guy who rules Egypt for pharaoh. It’s when Joseph’s brothers appear before him that the story gets relevant for us. Joseph, who of course recognizes his brothers though they don’t recognize him, tells his brothers who he really is. He says:

I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now don’t be distressed or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life….So it was not you who sent me here, but God.

The brothers send for their father Jacob back in Canaan, he comes to Egypt, everyone gets fed, and they all live happily ever after, more or less. Something good came out of Joseph’s brothers’ murderous treachery. The good thing that came out of the brother’s treachery is that the family of Jacob is saved from famine, so the salvation history of Israel continues as God had promised.

Now, that’s a nice Hollywood ending, but there’s a big problem here. Joseph attributes his brothers’ treachery to God. He says: “So it was not you who sent me here, but God.” God brought me here to preserve life, he says. Now, I certainly know that it’s true that God can and does bring good out of bad. That has happened for me in my personal life. Perhaps it has happened for you too. The problem here isn’t that something good came out of something bad. The problem is that in the way Joseph interprets his story God is at best a slave trader who causes something horrific to happen so that something good can come out of it. And I just don’t think so.

God can bring good out of bad, but God doesn’t cause bad so that good can come out of it. The God we know as love in Christ Jesus would never do such a thing. God hasn’t caused the pandemic we’re suffering through. God isn’t punishing us with it. God isn’t using the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and economic collapse just so God can bring something good out of it. God just doesn’t do things like that. God didn’t sell Joseph into slavery in Egypt the way this story says God did. God would never do such a thing. Yet something good did come out of the very bad thing that happened to Joseph. His family was saved from famine. Good really can come out of evil.

So this morning I want to ask: Can anything good come out of this God-awful pandemic we’re living through? I sure understand if it doesn’t seem to you that it possibly could. If you’re like me you’re sure not experiencing the pandemic as something good, and the statistics tells us that it is indeed something very bad for a great many people. Yet if good can come out of murderous treachery the way it does in the story of Joseph, perhaps we can hope that something good can come out the way this coronavirus has turned the world upside down. God hasn’t caused the pandemic, but just maybe with God’s help we can bring something good out of it. So I invite each of you, as I have invited myself, seriously and prayerfully to consider what good could possibly come out of our present troubles for you, your family, our nation and God’s world. And I’ll share with you just a few thoughts I’ve had on the subject.

It seems to me that the most important good thing that can come out of this pandemic is a chance for us individually and as a nation to think anew about what really matters. We, or at least many of us, have had to give up so much. In person retail shopping except for necessities, and maybe not even for them. Going out for a meal at a restaurant. Perhaps working in an office or other place of employment and either working from home or not working at all. Seeing friends and family in person. Road trips. In person worship. Many of us have given up so many of the things that used to occupy our time. We could I suppose just sit around and mope about that, but we could also consider that we now have an opportunity to consider our lives in ways we, or at least I, don’t often do in normal times.

So I invite you this morning to consider what really matters to you personally. Spiritually. Economically. For your family. For the church. For us as a country. For God’s world. For any other parts of life that you can think of. Do we really need to be doing all the things we used to do? Does our country look the same to you today as it did six months ago? Or can you see failings that have become more clear so that may now we could do something about them? Things like the failure of our medical system to cover everyone? The extent of Americans’ anti-intellectualism that leads them to deny the scientists and think that their uninformed opinions are as valid as those of real experts? Does the role of the federal government look different to you today than it used to given its evident failure to deal with the pandemic in a constructive way? What does doing church electronically tell you about church? Does the church building seem as important to you as it used to? Are there other ways in which you can see the church changing because of what we’ve learned these past months and will learn before this pandemic is over?

I’ll leave it at that for now, but please take some time to consider these aspects of life. We will, with God’s help, come out of this pandemic. But we have the chance, again with God’s help, to come out of it better than we were going into it. May it be so. Amen.