(The readings for the day were from Genesis 45, where Joseph reveals his identity to his brothers; Romans 11 where Paul affirms God's mercy, and Matthew 15, where a Gentile woman teaches us about the kingdom of God.)
Many of you know Audrey, who's part of our staff team in the church. Well, she and I just discovered that we both love a television series called "I Survived." Each episode shows how real, everyday people found themselves in terrifying, near-death scenarios and came out on the other side. Audrey and I went back and forth for a while this week about the girl who was attacked by a shark and the waitress who escaped an armed robbery (all the while Ray is standing by politely nodding) and we both agreed that the reason we like the show has nothing to do with the terrifying, near-death scenarios, but with the way the people tell their stories.
Many of you know Audrey, who's part of our staff team in the church. Well, she and I just discovered that we both love a television series called "I Survived." Each episode shows how real, everyday people found themselves in terrifying, near-death scenarios and came out on the other side. Audrey and I went back and forth for a while this week about the girl who was attacked by a shark and the waitress who escaped an armed robbery (all the while Ray is standing by politely nodding) and we both agreed that the reason we like the show has nothing to do with the terrifying, near-death scenarios, but with the way the people tell their stories.
See, on "I Survived," the survivors are the ones who narrate events. Three people take turns telling what happened to them from beginning to end, then reflect on why they think they made it out of their situation. And while you're sitting there with your jaw on the floor, wondering what in the world you would do if your boat capsized in the middle of the ocean, or you were kidnapped by armed rebels and held for ransom, here is this person who it really happened to, sitting up straight, clean and dressed and not falling apart, recounting their trials honestly, in full emotional detail, and attempting to make some meaning of why they survived and what has happened since. I'm absolutely sucked in to these stories, and I'm more than absolutely fascinated by what I take to be these individuals' unbelievable, unimaginable, sheer human resilience.
Now we're all resilient. You couldn’t get out of bed every day if you weren't. Resilience describes how a person deals with change, challenge, disappointment, trauma, upset - how she or he is able to recover or return from a sentinel event. I've heard resiliency described as "bounce-back," but the peppiness of that term doesn't honor the range of things that draw on our reservoirs of resilience. Everyday disappointments and ailments require resilience, but when we think about people who are truly resilient, we imagine children who suffer trauma and loss and continue to hope and love - or who are bullied, but continue to try and to study and to dream. We imagine people who are diagnosed with diseases and face treatments that are painful and mysterious and that reorganize one's whole life and identity. For the rest of my life, when I hear the word "resilient," I will think of families I knew as a hospital chaplain who sped into the ER at three-AM, sat in a cubicle clutching a cup of coffee, and walked away a few hours later, bereft of a person who was alive when they woke up that morning. They were actually able to physically stand, say good-bye to us, and to go home. You can add any number of things to the list - but we all have an idea, we have all lived the kind of resilience that is possible at the extremes of human experience.
In fact, we've got an example of it right in front of us this morning: Joseph shows greater resilience than any other person we've met in Genesis this summer. Everything starts out okay for the poor guy - better than okay! He's Jacob's favorite son … but dad doesn't do a great job of hiding it. To make matters worse, Joseph is a bit oblivious. He dreams his whole family will bow down to him one day, and instead of writing this interesting little item down in his papyrus diary, he opens up his mouth and lets everybody in on the secret. His older, stronger, even less appropriate brothers first throw him in a pit, then get enterprising and decide to sell him as a slave. Later on, when they're feeling remorseful, they remember that he pleaded in anguish to be set free and return home with them.
But Joseph is resilient! He takes in the reality of what's happened to him, he adjusts, and he moves forward. He does so well and is so resourceful and responsible that he rises to a place of prominence in his master's household and gains admiration and esteem. Yet with all that positive attention comes the wrong kind of attention. Joseph's accused of a crime he didn't commit and ends up in the Egyptian slave prison we heard about last week. From low to high to lower.
While he's in prison, though, Joseph repeats the pattern of resilience and recalibration that served him so well as a slave, and again rises to a place of responsibility and respect. He interprets the dream of Pharaoh's cupbearer, and when that man goes back to the palace, he recommends Joseph to the ruler. Pharaoh himself is so pleased with Joseph that he appoints him "steward" of all of Egypt, responsible for every human being, every rock, every stalk of grain that Pharaoh oversees. The scene where Pharaoh restores Joseph, when he gives him back the dignity that people have been trying to rob him of his whole life, is beautiful - it's like Cinderella sliding her foot into a glass slipper: Pharaoh covers Joseph in fine garments, heaps gold chains around his neck, and puts him in the chariot of his second-in-command. He makes everybody take a knee in front of Joseph. Resilient Joseph is, literally, rehabilitated.
But to what end? Joseph has withstood hardship that rivals anything we can imagine: betrayal, abandonment, forced labor, libel, imprisonment. And now it looks like he's gotten back more than he ever had. But in truth, there's still something out there, a daily stressor siphoning resources out of Joseph's resilience reservoir, demanding that he respond, adapt, assimilate every hour of his life. Think about this: Joseph was put in the chariot of Pharaoh's second-in-command. So what happened to the other guy? Where's the chariot's former occupant? Joseph met the cupbearer in slave prison, where that man was chucked at the whim of an all-powerful, capricious ruler. Joseph's security depends on the will of a person who could change his mind in an instant, and Joseph's life up until this point hasn't shown him that bosses - or brothers - can be trusted. Now Joseph has to be resilient because he has to withstand living in constant fear. He has to be able to function - and function well - knowing that the rug can be pulled out from under him at any moment.
This is where resilience needs a boost. Resilience is the power of survival, and survival is basic. Before anything can get better for you, you've got to get through it. You have to survive. The theological importance of resilience can't be underestimated: it's part of creation, it's part of sustenance - of ongoing life; it's part of persistence and endurance, and it's a gift. But we're created, sustained, we persist and endure because we are made for redemption. That is our end. Resilience is how we survive, but redemption is how we thrive, and we are meant to thrive.
Thriving is hard, though, because in our lives we learn all the same lessons that Joseph does. We learn that people can hurt us. We learn that people who were here today can be gone tomorrow. We learn that nature and commerce and our own bodies can turn on us in a second. And if we look to things that are shifting - to things that are subject to change, like Pharaoh's mind - we learn to live like we're always looking over our shoulders; like we are always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Be it others' approval, be it outward signs of success, be it the permanence of the structures and institutions around us, if we place all of our trust in those things, it will take every bit of our resilience just to pray that they will still be there tomorrow.
What makes the difference then? How do you make the leap of faith from resilience to redemption, from surviving to thriving? How do you go from living life cautiously, with your nails dug in - especially if you've been hurt - to living life redemptively, with your hands wide open - especially if you've been hurt?
I get a glimpse of that difference when I see young children hope and love as though they can’t help it in the face of disappointment. Or when I would see or hear from those families in the hospital about how their lives were unfolding in the wake of grief. I glimpse the difference in people here who share stories of divorce or illness, or challenges with family and employment and trust gone awry. In these instances the difference is in meaning-making. It's in being able to perceive how God may be moving and creating not only in resilience but in the aftermath of everything that requires us to be resilient. And meaning-making is more than a matter of interpretation - it's part of how God puts something new into the world. The people who talk about the terrifying things that have happened to them on the television show "I Survived" all have something to say about this, from having a very vague notion that they’re alive because there is something left for them to do, to having new relationships, new insights, a new sense of purpose or mission or new ability to help others that wasn't there before. In the face of challenges, they have been resilient but their eyes have been open to all of the points of light piercing the darkness and pulling life together again in bright new constellations. By the grace of God they have perceived a new story being told and have wandered into it by faith, with trust.
And when this happens, something changes. When we ask God for the strength to see new possibilities where doors were closed, to form new relationships where others were broken, to cultivate different abilities when limitations set in, we change, the world changes, and that is redemptive. When a person asks God to make meaning where there was once chaos, that is the difference between hanging on - survival alone - and between a world reborn - thriving. That is us partnering with God to turn the stuff of our lives into the stuff of miracles. That is God's healing, renewing work alive today as it was in the beginning.
Which is why we don't have to totally despair about Joseph. Because however fearful he may be, however hampered by past hurt and present limitation, he has started this process of meaning-making. There’s a famine in the land, and today Joseph’s brothers have come to Egypt for food. They have no idea that the man in front of them is the boy that they discarded, and Joseph has a choice. He can survive, and have nothing to do with them. He can even be generous and send them away with food, but never reveal who he is. Nobody would judge him for that. Instead, he perceives an opportunity. He probes them to find out if they’re sorry, to find out how they are caring for his father and other brother, and in the end, Joseph cannot help but choose reconciliation and create a space of redemption in the world around him that never existed before. When he reveals himself, his brothers try to apologize to him, but he shoots for the sky, way beyond their single, fateful misdeed to its ultimate outcome: a relationship of affection that never existed between him and them, a supply of food for a hungry nation, lives preserved and renewed out of events that could have been just "hardships." Later on, he explains it like this: "even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good."
The difference between resiliency alone and redemption born of resiliency is a matter of trust and freedom and openness. It’s a matter of praying the one prayer that this woman utters in our Gospel today, “Lord, help me,” and believing that God is flooding you and me and all the earth with redemptive possibility even when we can’t see it. It’s resurrection in the fullest sense of the word: coming back to life each day, and breaking life open with the astounding possibility of each day. And it happens because the same God who gives us the strength to survive gives us the power to thrive.
Sermon preached by the Reverend Danielle Thompson at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL on Sunday, August 14, 2011.
