We’ve all had times in life when everything changes suddenly. Sometimes, it’s due to a bad turn of events. Sometimes, it’s just the natural course of life. For instance, you my have gone away to college and found yourself in an entirely new world. Or you may have changed jobs at one point in your career and discovered that your new company does business in a way very different from your old one. When confronted with these changes, you have to decide how you were going to live your life in this new environment. In both cases, you may find yourself facing moral or ethical challenges in which you have to choose how you will act. You may find yourself in situations where your old sense of values is challenged.
When his brothers sold him into slavery in Egypt, Joseph faced the same situation. He found himself working in the household of a powerful Egyptian named Potipher. Yet Joseph is able to not only survive I his new surroundings, he thrives in them. How is he able to do that? At the risk of sounding like a cotemporary mega-church preacher, I think the story teaches us three things.
First, when his life falls apart, Joseph doesn’t sulk about it. After a Mrs. Robinson encounter with Potipher’s wife, Joseph is falsely accused of hitting on her. He finds himself imprisoned. He could have just felt sorry for himself, but instead he looks for the opportunity in this new situation. He meets two Egyptian officials who have also been incarcerated and correctly interprets their dreams for them. Down the road, this leads to him being released from prison and being elevated to the number two position in Egypt.
The second thing Joseph does to thrive in his new life is to stay true to his values and beliefs. When he turns down Potipher’s wife, he says it would be a offense to God to sleep with her. Notice he does not make the claim that would usually be made in an ancient culture, that it would be an offense to her husband, since after all she was his property. Joseph’s view of ethics and morality is more universal than simple pragmatism.
Additionally, when he later interprets Pharaoh’s dreams, this trait comes through gain. Pharaoh gives Joseph a generic compliment about his dream interpretation abilities. Joseph takes it and makes it specific. He says his gifts come from God.
The third thing Joseph does is something I would like to spend a little more time on. Although he stays true to his values, Joseph doesn’t assume that engaging the culture will water down his values
There had never been a rock band at the Christian High School I attended. Rumor had it, a group of kids had played the Stones “Honky Tonk Woman” at a talent show a few years earlier and were never seen nor heard from again. So when a few friends and I wanted to have our band to play at our senior talent show, we met with some resistance. The school administration looked at us, not as if we had two heads, but as if we bit the head off a bat.
I don’t even remember what song we wanted to play, all I remember are the reasons why performing this song would not be, in their words, “God-glorifying”. Surprisingly the lyrics were not the issue. Instead they were concerned about the origins of rock music. One teacher told me, “It’s not so much the lyrics of this particular song, it’s the environment of rebellion, alcohol and drugs from which it comes.” I explained that we were not endorsing those things, but their minds were made up. Rock music was “of the world’ and as such had this supernatural ability to be a sinful influence, even when no such influence was intended.
That same fear of “worldly things” extends to other areas besides music. Movies, TV, philosophy, science, even social issues have all at one time or another been considered too worldly, and inherently bad, by religious people. (Curiously, the list of the things of this world has rarely included materialism, militarism or prejudice.) As a result, Christians have often disengaged from the world around us and focused instead on things deemed spiritual, sacred or Christian. This retreat from the real world has always been justified with the refrain that we Christians are supposed to be “in the world but not of the world.” I thought I would preach a little on that Bible verse this week, but much to my chagrin, when I tried to look it up I discovered that this phrase never appears in our Bibles (like other famous lines such as “God helps those who help themselves” or “Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior”).
Certainly, the Bible and Jesus are clear that much of what the world has to offer is harmful, offensive to God and just plain wrong. That is why in the Gospel of John we are told the world will hate us or the Letter to James cautions us to remain unspotted by the world. Paul told us to not be conformed to this world but to be transformed. This gave rise to his paraphrase of being in the world but not of it, but far too often, the church has emphasized the “not of it” part of that phrase to the extreme of “not even being in it”. Following Jesus is not as simple as separating ourselves from the surrounding culture and just waiting to go to heaven. Instead, when we look to our Bibles we find that the relationships between God’s people and the surrounding cultures is always a bit messier than that.
Joseph’s story is a perfect example. When finding himself in the completely alien culture of Egypt, whose belief system was vastly different that of than his Hebrew background, Joseph finds a way to thrive as an Egyptian while still being true to his Hebrew principles. His example is instructive to us because you and I need to find a way to have a meaningful life in this culture, while still being true followers of Jesus.
So many of the things that Joseph does in the story are thoroughly Egyptian. He interprets dreams. He shaves his head. He even dresses like an Egyptian. Just as a garment is used to deceive his father Jacob about his disappearance, a garment also is involved in the false accusations against him by Potipher’s wife, as well as to symbolize his elevation to Egyptian power. At the story’s end, Joseph is even mummified and buried as an Egyptian. No one in his family asks, “Aren’t we endorsing the Egyptian view of an afterlife by doing that?”
When his life falls apart, Joseph doesn’t wallow in self-pity. He doesn’t spend all his time in Potifer’s house recounting his sad story to anyone who will listen. He doesn’t use his problems as an excuse to sleep with his employer’s wife. He doesn’t find Jesus in prison and get a book deal (or I guess back then you got a hieroglyphics wall deal). Instead, he uses his situation to serve those around him, to look out for their welfare. His actions end up saving thousands from starvation, including as we’ll see, his own family. By doing so he unwittingly forwards God’s ongoing project of reconciliation in the world.
So when life hands you a big change, when you find yourself
in a whole new world and your old life left behind, look to Joseph. Don’t pity yourself. Don’t lose your values. Don’t retreat from the world around
you. Step boldly into life as a
follower of Jesus and you’ll never know what greater story you will be
advancing.
A message from Genesis 41 by Don Heatley, pastor of Vision Community Church, Warwick, NY
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