Saved Through Sin
Genesis 37:1–4, 12–28
I ran across this pro’s and con’s list about golf on social media and I laughed out loud. For those of you who don’t follow professional golf, the humor may not be obvious. The professional golfer, Patrick Reed, I think it is fair to say not the most popular professional golfer. He’s kind of seen as arrogant, entitled, brash, and even a cheat. He was thrown off the University of Georgia golf team and later transferred to Augusta State where he finished his golf career. Those who are now on the PGA Tour who were once his teammates in college, all universally hate him. He is rumored to have stolen $400 from a teammate among other things and suspected of having reported lower scores than he actually shot during his collegiate career. He boasted that he was one of the top five golfers in the world back in 2014, not only before he had won the Master’s, but before he had even appeared in a major championship. He is estranged from his own parents and sister and once had his parents removed from a golf tournament. He shushes and shuns fans in the galleries. In team golf events, he has whined about not getting to play more and blamed other players for not wanting to play with him. There’s plenty more that could be said, but you get the point. Patrick Reed isn’t exactly a fan favorite. I don’t much care for him either.
Perhaps that is why I, along with much of the golfing world was delighted when in 2019 at a golf tournament that he was leading, he was assessed a two shot penalty after his round after video evidence emerged of him improving his lie in a hazard area. Here’s a clip of the incident.
He would go on to lose the tournament by just two strokes. I was delighted because I really enjoyed watching Patrick get caught and called out for something. It felt so right. Don’t you just love it when people get what they have got coming for them? I know I do. When you see that speeding driver who had long since passed you, zigging and zagging through traffic, on the side of the road, pulled over by a state trooper — that feeling is just the best isn’t it.
And so we can kind of understand the impulse of Joseph’s brothers in our Scripture this morning. Joseph is singled out as his father’s favorite. In verse 2, Joseph tattle tales on them for an unspecified reason. His father made for him an ornate coat that during those times, likely would have signified royalty. By choosing to wear this ornate coat while tracking down his brothers, Joseph was intentionally throwing his favored status in their faces and even suggesting that he should indeed be ruler over them. That was something that he had done in describing two dreams he had in the portion of the text that we skipped over this morning where they are represented as sheaves of grain and stars in the sky bowing down to him. A dream that he seemed all too pleased to share with his brothers.
His brothers felt about him the way that most golf fans feel about Patrick Reed. They would just love to see him come into harm’s way. And so, they help the process along — contemplating killing him and framing a vicious animal, but after Rueben’s more measured disregard for his brother, they settle for selling him into slavery. And bonus — they can profit off Joseph getting what he deserves as well.
Doesn’t it just feel good to see someone like Joseph getting what he deserves? Especially after snitching on his brothers.
It gives the rest of us a sense of peace. A sense of justice.
They felt so good about what they had done that after selling Joseph off, the very next thing they do is sit down and eat. No guilty consciences here.
Nevertheless, even though I love it, as your preacher, I am here to proclaim to you this morning that this schadenfreude, as it is often called, is not the way God works. This isn’t the justice of God, though it is often confused as such. God’s justice isn’t the type that cheaply and quickly satisfies populist outrage. It is far more creative than that.
There are some obvious parallels between the story of Joseph in the Bible and that of Jesus. The journey to Egypt and back. The stripping of his clothes. Being sold out for silver coins. Provides food for hungry people. And I believe that the story of Joseph can actually help correct some bad Christian theology that is pretty prevalent in misunderstanding the death of Jesus. There’s an impoverished version of the gospel that one can string together with isolated, out-of-context Bible verses through a practice known as prooftexting. And there are some major elements of truth within it, but it falls short of seeing the bigger picture of what God is up to in the redemption of the world. In this telling of the gospel, we humans have fallen short of the glory of God. We have sinned. The wages of sin are death. For sinning, we deserve death. Even eternal punishment in hell. The only person who has not sinned, is Jesus Christ. A God angry with us at our sin, still loves us, and so that God allows or even requires the sacrifice of his perfect, unblemished son to atone for the sins of all the rest of us, thus satisfying divine anger against us for our sins.
Where I believe this version of the gospel goes wrong is assuming that God is just like the rest of us. That God enjoys watching all God’s smug, entitled, bratty creations get what they have coming to them. That God is just like me in my disdain for Patrick Reed. That God has the same sense of moral superiority that we have when we pass that speeding, reckless driver pulled over by the cops. That God is just like one of Joseph’s brothers who wanted to see him killed or enslaved.
But God’s character, the depth of God’s love is far deeper and more resilient than that. And the part of me that is gleeful about Patrick Reed getting what he deserves is coming from the part of myself that Jesus is still working on. We’ve seen over these past weeks, how God continued to move in Jacob’s life, despite some major flaws and sin in his life. The core of the gospel is not that Jesus Christ took a punishment that we all deserved. If this were the case, then Jesus’ death on the cross — Good Friday — would be the most important holiday in the Christian calendar. In reality, Easter is irrelevant in this telling of the gospel — the one that says, we’re saved by Jesus taking our punishment on the cross. But God’s true heart is, as Jesus said, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”
God is not angry with us. God saves us by what should have never happened. It was sin that nailed Jesus to the cross — not in taking our place for the punishment God wanted to see brought upon us, but the corruption, greed, and desire for power among the Roman officials, the Jewish leaders who cozied up to them, and the easily swayed populist crowd who just wanted something to be done to someone. Jesus’s death on the cross was a great injustice. But it satisfied the emotional fervor of the moment that demanded something be done, just as dealing with Joseph satisfied the anger and outrage running hot among Joseph’s brothers. And we’re tempted to confuse that short term emotional satisfaction with salvation.
Put another way — we are saved not because of a divinely ordained, one-time-exception, whereby God allows this one act of injustice, but rather we are saved through what should never have happened. God is constantly making beautiful things out of our brokenness. God continued to work creatively and miraculously through the sin that nailed Jesus to the cross bringing out of it Easter resurrection. What many meant for harm, God used for a far greater, deeper, abundant and eternal salvation.
And this is what happens in the story of Joseph. He’s sold off into slavery and is taken to Egypt. Joseph ends up in a position of power within Egypt after having helped foretell of a coming famine. Famine strikes the land of Canaan too and Joseph’s brothers travel to Egypt in search of food just to survive. And they encounter none other than their brother Joseph. From later in the story:
Genesis 45:4–8, 15 [SLIDE #3 & #4]
4 Then Joseph said to his brothers, ‘Come closer to me.’ And they came closer. He said, ‘I am your brother Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. 5 And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. 6 For the famine has been in the land these two years; and there are five more years in which there will be neither ploughing nor harvest. 7 God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. 8 So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. 15 And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them; and after that his brothers talked with him.
God indeed works through what should never have happened to redeem the world. This is reflected in the imagery of salvation in the Bible. The spears being beaten into pruning hooks. A child playing in the hole of a poisonous snake. The lion and lamb lying down together. What was once violent, is now at peace, even an instrument of peace. God saves, not by sacrificing the innocent, but by working through the difficulties and injustice that they suffer.
The sort of harmony we find in these Biblical images of salvation in the Bible just is not the kind of thing that happens when one punishes the sinful. Or even finds a substitute for that punishment. Punishment is good at relieving the short-term feelings of outrage that exist when we see someone doing something wrong — of quelling populist rage. But this desire is itself something that needs redeeming. God’s correction is never bloodlust but is always in the service of helping us become more. This brings us closer to God’s kingdom.
When we see someone punished for doing wrong, the value only comes if they grow from the experience. After I had my moment of enjoyment seeing Patrick Reed punished for violating the rules and lose a tournament because of it, then what? If I am honest, he has not now been restored to a status where I admire him. I still harbor ill feelings towards him. After we see that reckless driver pulled over by the cops — what is next for us?
Friends, this is the difference between our ideas of salvation and God’s. It isn’t just about everyone getting what they deserve. Joseph’s brothers may have had some satisfaction on the day they sold him into slavery, but they still ended up barely hanging on to the thread of life. God’s idea of salvation is to constantly, always, already be at work making something new, something redemptive, something beautiful out of our brokenness — whether that brokenness is personal or corporate sin or sin that has left us wounded in some way.
Don’t settle for this heresy of subsitutionary atonement that Joseph’s brothers tried to sell to their father when they handed him a tunic dipped in blood, allowing a slaughtered kid to be substituted for Joseph. It is a cheap grace that feels good in the moment, but is deeply at odds with the kind of transformation God needs to happen deep in the lives of each and every one of us.
And this is about more than just Christian theology and how we understand salvation. It is about God’s working in our lives. I invite you to think of a person that you’re outraged by their behavior (perhaps you have more than one!). Ask yourself, deep down — would you delight in the pain of their being punished even more than their genuine transformation towards something more in keeping with the heartbeat of God? There is much to be outraged and angry about in our world. But it does not help when we find our own satisfaction in the suffering that comes with the punishment of those who are the objects of our outrage. It is a refusal to see the creative, ongoing work of God’s salvation and transformation. It is a decision to end the story where we want it to end, which is at the point where our enemies are punished, rather than allowing the full story to play out and see the possibility of God working through our own enemies for good. What good could possibly come from Joseph, his brothers probably said to themselves. In the Gospel of John, a man named Nathanael asks, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip responds to him, “Come and see.” John 1:46
Friends, may you have the courage to love your enemies enough to not let their story end at the suffering of punishment.
May you genuinely hope that God works through them and brings transformation and healing to their life and to our world because of them.
May you turn over the part of you that rejoices in the suffering of those who are your enemies, to a God who will even work goodness out of this unholy impulse.
May you, when you’re tempted to ask, “Can anything good come of THAT?” Not give in to your populist outrage, but rather have the emotional and spiritual courage to “Come and See.”
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — Amen.
