Unintended Consequences

 

PROPERS:          7 EPIPHANY, YEAR C

TEXT:                GENESIS 45:3-11, 15             

PREACHED AT ST. PAUL’S CHAPEL, MAGNOLIA SPRINGS, ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2022.

 

ONE SENTENCE:        Life may bring us bitter disappointments and losses, but with our assistance, God may bring new life when it is unexpected.

 

            In July of 1941, a child was born in Chicago, Illinois. He was reared mostly there, because his mother left the Mississippi Delta in the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural south to northern cities.

 

            Fourteen years and two weeks later, when he was just entering adolescence, the young boy traveled back to spend his summer with family near Money, Mississippi.  Money is a small, no-traffic light bump in the road five miles north of Greenwood.

 

            The young boy and his cousins ventured to Bryant’s Store, the only retail establishment in that village.  What transpired there is disputed. However, the store clerk – Carolyn Bryant, the wife of the store’s owner, Roy Bryant – claimed that the 14-year-old had whistled at her.  Whether it was true or not, the allegation violated the unwritten code of that era. 

 

            Two nights later, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, went to the house of the boy’s family. They grabbed Emmett Till from his bed and took him to a shack a few miles away.  There they beat him, mutilated him, shot him, and then tied him to a cotton gin motor and threw his lifeless body into the Tallahatchie River.

 

            The boy’s body was recovered from the river’s murky waters three days later.

 

            Two months later, a jury found Bryant and Milam not guilty of charges resulting from the boy’s beating and death.  The next year – protected from double-jeopardy – Bryant and Milam told Look Magazine that, yes, they had lynched Emmett Till.

 

            The sordid and tragic episode led to the modern civil rights movement.  The Montgomery bus boycott and Rosa Parks came soon thereafter.  The whole dramatic tableau played out on television. Years later, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act would become law – enacted in bipartisan action by Congress.

 

            Things were not perfect, but we were wrestling with the issues. And we were moving toward our goal of being a more perfect union.

 

+ + + 

 

            The lesson from Genesis today is part of one of the great stories of the Old Testament.

 

            Joseph’s brothers, being very jealous of him, had sold him into slavery in Egypt years before. While in slavery, Joseph caught the eye of Pharoah.  He rose through the ranks and became Pharoah’s right-hand man – the realm’s second most powerful man.

 

            Joseph foresaw the future. He led Egypt in preparing for a terrible famine, storing up grain for seven years of lean time.

 

            It was to Egypt that Joseph’s brothers came from Israel, seeking food from that nation’s abundance. In today’s lesson, Joseph reveals himself to his brothers. There is a dramatic union and reconciliation. Forgiveness rules. 

 

Five chapters later, the Book of Genesis concludes. Joseph speaks these words to the brothers who betrayed him and sold him into slavery: “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.”

 

            Ponder those words: You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.

 

+ + + 

 

            At this point, we could go down the rabbit hole of Calvinistic predestination – God causing certain betrayals or misfortunes so that he can work his wonders.  My perspective is different: God takes those betrayals, misfortunes, and evil deeds caused by human sin and seeks to bring good out of them. 

 

I believe God did that with Joseph being sold into slavery, thereby bringing his brothers to the security and plenty of Egypt. And I believe that God brought the civil rights movement out of the horrid lynching of Emmett Till.

 

            Such dramatic changes of circumstances require the participation of faithful people – to seek to be agents of God’s redeeming work.  At the very least, we need not stand in the way of that work.

 

            All of this is the lynchpin of my own theology: existential redemption. God is always seeking to bring reconciliation from enmity, healing from brokenness, joy from sorrow, and life from death.