Bible reading: Genesis 45:1-15.

Message.

Dartmouth is a pretty and much visited town in south Devon. It is famous for many things: its picturesque narrow streets climbing up the hillside, its beautiful location on the River Dart, its castle, and the Britannia Naval College. You can take boat trips up the river on a vintage paddle steamer, or cross to Kingswear for a ride on a steam train with, perhaps, a visit to Agatha Christie’s house. For many years, too, Dartmouth was home to a bookshop owned by Christopher Robin Milne, who hid when people asked him about Winnie-the-Pooh.

Since 1981 Dartmouth has been home to another shop, owned by the artist Simon Drew. Even if you don’t recognise Simon’s name, you’ve probably come across his ingenious, punning pictures on postcards, prints, calendars, even mugs. We have two prints hanging on our wall. One, which seemed to fit in well with Moira being a primary school teacher, depicts “Joined-up whiting” (just change the “h” for an “r”); while the other, appropriate to my calling as a minister, shows “Cod moving in a mysterious way” (again, change just one letter).

That last pun which, as I’m sure we all know, is the first line of a hymn written in 1774 by William Cowper, a poet and friend of the former slave-ship captain John Newton. This hymn expresses, I think, many of the doubts and questions we may have about God: it speaks of his “bright designs” and “sovereign will”, it says that his outwardly “frowning providence” actually “hides a smiling face”, it declares that “his purposes will ripen fast”, and it warns against the error of “blind unbelief”. This is a thoroughly grown-up hymn which recognises that there is so much we don’t understand about God and the ways he works in our world.

And so we come to Joseph. A lot has happened since we saw him last week, sold by his brothers as a slave and being hustled off to Egypt. Since then he’s worked his way up the servant scale in rich Potiphar’s house but been caught by Mrs Potiphar’s honey-trap and thrown into jail when he refused to sleep with her. While in jail his dreams have predicted the fates of both Pharaoh’s cupbearer (good) and his baker (bad). Two years later Pharaoh himself has two troubling dreams which none of his wise men can explain. However Joseph’s allegedly divine gift of interpretation has been recognised, so he’s pulled out of prison and told Pharaoh’s dreams. He not only tells him that the country will experience seven years of excellent harvests followed by seven years of drought, but suggests a plan for dealing with the forthcoming crisis. Pharaoh is so impressed that he promotes Joseph to be his second-in-command – not bad for a foreigner who, until recently, has been a foreign slave and a falsely-convicted rapist! But this should come as no surprise to us because, as the author of Genesis constantly reminds us, God has been with Joseph throughout his journey.

Up to this point, we’ve heard nothing more of Joseph’s father or brothers. But they are about to reappear because the famine and drought are no respecters of borders: Canaan too is suffering. The family sees that, due to Joseph’s planning (not that they know it), grain is still available in Egypt. To cut short a long and complicated story, they go to Egypt in order to survive and are eventually reunited with Joseph, who they don’t at first recognise. They also settle in Egypt rather than returning to Canaan: I’ll come back to that later.

It’s what Joseph says to his brothers that I want to highlight now: for his words are truly astonishing. “Do not be upset or blame yourselves because you sold me here. It was really God who sent me ahead of you to save people’s lives … God sent me ahead of you to rescue you and to make sure that you and your descendants survive … He has made me the king’s highest official. I am in charge of his whole country; I am the ruler of all Egypt”. Later on, after Jacob’s death, Joseph says, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people”. In other words, God – who, as I said last week, wasn’t even mentioned in the first part of Joseph’s story – has apparently arranged everything: the brothers selling their sibling into slavery, Joseph’s rise, fall and second rise in Egypt, the plentiful harvests and the subsequent famine – these things have all been part of God’s mega-plan to ensure the survival of the Hebrew people and the fulfilment of his promise to Abraham. That’s how Joseph sees things, at any rate; but can we buy into his belief? I don’t think so.

Before I say any more, I’d like to take you to Psalm 105. This starts in a very familiar way: “Give thanks to the Lord, proclaim his greatness; tell the nations what he has done … Be glad that we belong to him; let all who worship him rejoice.”. But everything changes in verse 16: “The Lord sent famine to their country and took away all their food. But he sent a man ahead of them, Joseph, who had been sold as a slave. His feet were kept in chains, and an iron collar was around his neck, until what he had predicted came true; the word of the Lord proved him right. Then the king of Egypt had him released; he made him ruler over all the land, with power over the king’s officials”. The Psalm continues with an account of the Hebrews’ prosperity and then slavery in Egypt, of Moses and the plagues, and of the amazing escape across the Red Sea. Here is a broad sweep over centuries of history, one which has the same mindset as Joseph: all this was God’s work.

Can we swallow this? Can – or should – we say that God permits or even engineers trickery, slavery, imprisonment and famine in order to achieve a particular end? Think of the hate felt by those brothers for Joseph, think of what it meant for him to be not only a slave but also thrown into gaol for a crime he did not commit, think of the suffering of innocent people during the years of famine. Looking forward, too, we must wonder if God made a mistake, because the Hebrew people in Egypt were themselves later enslaved, and only set free after plagues which caused death and misery to many. Can we honestly say that we like or believe in a God who acts like that? (And we haven’t even got to the destruction and slaughter as the Hebrews invade the by no means uninhabited Promised Land). Is this really how God works – because, if it is, I suspect that neither you nor I want anything to do with him.

Perhaps we should see Joseph’s words as simply his perception of what has been going on, as him drawing on his limited understanding of God in order to make sense of what he has experienced. We need to remind ourselves that the Bible, like all literature, has its perspectives and biases – for instance, this story has no interest in the other slaves who, we know, were very much part of ancient Egyptian life. We should notice, too, how Joseph acknowledges that it was a human action, not God’s, that set the whole story in motion: “I am your brother, whom you sold into Egypt”. The brothers did an evil thing which, it seems, God turned to good. Nevertheless we can’t escape the sense that God has been in overall control, bringing Joseph to Egypt to ensure that life, especially Jewish life, will go on, even in the face of famine.

At the very least this seems to have been a ridiculously convoluted way for God to carry out his purposes; surely he could have found a simpler way of making sure that his promises to Abraham wouldn’t fail? And, in any case, by taking Jacob and his family to Egypt, God seems to have set up a situation which was fairly obviously destined to go wrong. Quite apart from that, can we really believe that God was so concerned with plotting the life-story of just one person, albeit an important one, that he not basically ignored everybody else? We are again left with impossible questions about the way he works in history.

I can’t answer those questions; nor can the most erudite scholars and theologians. The only response I can give is that, as we read the Bible, we see people’s understanding of God developing and changing – for instance, in most of the Old Testament he is very clearly the Jewish God while in the New Testament he is the Saviour of all humanity; we also see him apparently changing from being a fierce God of judgement and warfare to compassionate one of peace and forgiveness; we also see our life with God changing from being trammelled by rules to one of freedom and love. So: is it God who changes? Or do people come to understand him better? I hope it’s the latter – and we must remember that this story of Jacob, Joseph and Egypt comes pretty near the Bible’s beginning. We’ve a long journey to make before we get to Jesus!

The other night Moira and I were watching a programme about the investigation of the murder of Damilola Taylor, a ten-year old boy who had only recently arrived in London from Nigeria. He was coming home from the library, happily skipping along the road, when he was brutally attacked by other boys. They hit him with a bottle which broke and slashed his femoral artery. He bled to death in the stairwell of the block of flats where he lived. It was only after a detailed forensic examination that his killers, scarcely older than Damilola, were brought to trial. We still don’t know the motive behind their attack.

Damilola’s father, Richard, back in Nigeria, was of course devastated when he heard the news. “I slumped to the ground”, he said, and caught the next morning’s flight from Lagos. Even in his grief he was determined to make sure that his son had not died in vain, and in just the following year he set up the Damilola Taylor Trust, aimed at supporting young people in south London who “ can feel unsure or apathetic about their future” and who, through a lack of guidance and ambition, are “susceptible to gang and knife crime, are at risk of being kicked out of school, or have yet to find their way to success”. The Trust’s projects have included career guidance, film-making, helping young people get into medical training, a campaign against knife crime, and many more. In 2011 Richard Taylor was awarded the OBE for his services to youth charities.

That Trust seems to be a force for good, making a real difference to the lives of disadvantaged young people. Richard Taylor – I have no idea if he had a Christian faith – managed to turn an act of great evil into something positive; many other people would either have sunk into despair or sought revenge. But that doesn’t mean that Damilola’s murder was a good thing, because it quite clearly was not. Stories like this leave us with many questions about God. But, then, so does the story of Jesus, cruelly and unjustly crucified. Were Judas, Pilate and the soldiers doing good? Clearly they weren’t – yet their evil acts brought about our salvation. God’s ways truly are mysterious!