Reconciliation is More Than a Moment

So you're joining us at the tail end of a sermon series called The Journey to Wholeness. The Journey to Wholeness— we're looking at one particular character in the Bible, a man by the name of Joseph. His story is told in, in Genesis chapter 45 through the end of that book, and he's a central character in the life of of the Old Testament. His father is a man by the name of Jacob who was renamed Israel, and through him the people of Israel, the Hebrews, took their shape and identity. And what we find ourselves in the conversation today with Joseph and his story is something that I think a lot of us can identify with. What we can identify with in particular are moments in our lives when we have some hard conversations, but yet the work is not undone. A hard conversation, maybe with a coworker, a family member, a friend, someone that you were close with, experienced some brokenness, and yet there's still more work to do after the quote-unquote "hard conversation." We've been there before, where we've rehearsed that conversation in our minds weeks or months, maybe even years, and then it finally happens. The conversation goes even better than planned. And yet, the conversation isn't over. Because the next time you saw them or some time later when you saw them, it didn't go as well. Something was said that triggered an emotion, a tone that didn't sound quite right. And all of a sudden, you're back at square one. You're at odds again. The brokenness is there. The pain is there, the hardness is there, the conversation, you're wondering, did it even take? And what I've realized in my times where I've experienced this kind of situation is that reconciliation is a slow work. It is not just a moment. It starts with an honest reflection, it includes a conversation, But that conversation, that honest moment, is just the front door. It's not what's on the other side. It's where we begin the process of reconciliation, not where it ends. And in Genesis chapter 47, we're on the other side of that hard conversation that Joseph has with his brothers and his father. We're on the other side of that moment of the tears that were shed. We're on the other side of that moment when honesty is communicated. We're on the other side, and yet there's still more work to be done. If you're new today and you're not familiar with the story of Joseph, let me just give you a quick overview. In Genesis chapter 37, we meet Joseph. He's the youngest son. He's got another younger one that's coming up later, but he's the youngest son who's got this dream and this vision of all of his brothers serving him. And so like any good person with a great dream does, they go and they share it with the very people who are going to serve them, right? Yeah, that's what Joseph does, and it does not go well for him. His brothers are not excited about this wonderful dream, and they put him in a pit, and then later they decide to sell him into slavery. They were so bitter, so angry with this brother, this younger brother, that after doing so, they just sat down and ate and went about business as as usual. The next chapters, 39 and 40, they tell us that Joseph was taken from slavery from one group to another group, and he was thrown into a prison. He gets out of prison and he becomes the servant in Potiphar's house, and Potiphar's wife accuses him of something he didn't do, and he's thrown back into prison yet again. And while he's in prison, some of his inmate partners, they have some dreams. And he interprets the dreams for them. For one, it means that they're going to get out of prison, and Joseph says, "Don't forget me." And exactly what he told him not to do, he did. He forgot him for 2 years, and then chapters 40 and 41 tell us about 2 years later, Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, has a dream that only Joseph is able to interpret. And the dream is about a famine that's going to happen and overtake the entire country. There were no signs of a famine. There were no signs of any danger. They're at the height of their nation's prowess. And so it seemed odd that there would be a famine. But yet Joseph predicts it, and then Pharaoh puts him in charge of all of the resources of Egypt so that they can get through the famine. While Joseph is the second in command in charge of all of Egypt's resources to get them through this famine, a family shows up that Joseph recognizes in chapter 42 through 44. It's his brothers. He looks different, but they don't, so they don't recognize him. They come before him and say, hey, we're starving, the famine is hitting us really, really hard. Is there any provision that you have for us. And the brothers follow the same kind of descent into Egypt that their brother Joseph did. Now they find themselves on the side where Joseph was—forgotten, lonely, lost, and in need. And it's in that moment that we see Joseph's emotional health really start to show up. Because when you're face to face with the people who've done you wrong, there's always the question, will you return the pain that they brought to you? When you're on the other side of your healing journey, when you're on the other side of the relationship, when you're on the other side and that person approaches you, those are the moments where you ask yourself, do I have the strength to do differently to them what they did to me, or do I do to them the evil that they did to me? Well, Joseph takes his time. He's like, I got to figure this out. I got to see if they're truly repentant. I got to see if they truly change, you know, their heart. And so in 45, he goes through this long, arduous process to see if they're really sincere about who they are. And he says, "Yeah, you are." And he reveals himself. "I'm the brother you sold into slavery some 2 decades ago. I'm the one that you've forgotten about. I am the one. Is my father still alive?" And they say, "Yeah." Chapter 46, they go get Father Jacob and they bring him back, you know, to Egypt. And here we are in chapter 47, face to face now with the other side of reconciliation. And here's my main idea for us to think about: reconciliation is not an event to get through, but it is a life to rebuild. It's not an event to get through, it is a life to rebuild. And in the rebuilding, God gives us the stuff to rebuild it with. The choice is ours. Chapter 47, we pick up in the story. Jacob and the sons have made it to Egypt, and Joseph is there. He's the second in command. He can do whatever he wants to do with this family, but here's what he does. Verse 11 through 12: Joseph settles his father and his brothers in Egypt and gave them property— where? In the best part of the land. The district of Rameses, as Pharaoh directed. And then Joseph also provided his father and his brothers and his father's household with food according to the number of their children. There were about 70 members in the family. So when Joseph could have withheld good, Joseph chooses not to withhold the good that he is able to provide. Instead of meting out and withholding the the good that he could provide. He releases it. He acts in generosity. He acts in a way that goes above and beyond what we are conditioned to think. What is reconciliation like on the other side of this hard conversation? And he demonstrates, he demonstrates not only forgiveness, not only reconciliation, but restoration. He puts them in a place called Goshen. A land that is fertile, but also a land that is protected. A land that the Egyptians weren't really concerned about as much because that's where the shepherds go. And that's where they are provided for and protected and allowed to thrive. If you know the story, they start with 70 members in the clan and it grows to a million over the years and decades. To come. They grow into a million people here in Egypt, and here Joseph advocates for them, reminding us of this: that God's reconciliation work is never just emotional, it is architectural. It's not just emotional, it's architectural. That means there's some structure behind it. There's a design behind the reconciliation. That means, in other words, if I could use another word, there is purpose in it. That God doesn't just seek to reconcile or restore the relationship. The reconciler, that is God, he seeks to build something sustainable in it. He wants to see the family come back together. He wants to see relationship restored because what has broken relationships and experiencing human flourishing on this side of heaven is the pride and the bitterness that seeps into our hearts and keeps us distant from one another. And yet, this is the gospel pattern. The gospel pattern, the good news of Jesus, is that we're not just reconciled in one area at one time in relationship, but there is a flourishing to come forward after that reconciliation takes place. And this moment is Jacob and Joseph's moment. And Jacob is so excited to see his younger son Joseph, he says, I can die now. That's it. I can die. I've experienced my loss, but now it's been found. I'm restored. We're restored. And now I can die. But Joseph says, no, no, this is just the beginning. This is just the breakthrough. And for many of us, we essentially stop at just the moment of reconciliation, failing to recognize That is the beginning, not the end. Anybody ever gone through physical therapy? Right, a couple people. Yeah, yep. Younger people, y'all don't know about that yet. All right, all right, yeah. Maybe you do. You have an injury, right? It's something that, boom, it causes like this major point. And when you identify the pain, that's not the end of the story. We've identified where the pain comes from. We know how to treat this, maybe with some medication, maybe surgery. But the medication, the surgery, that's not the end. You have to go through a process of recovery and restoration. The goal is not just to identify the pain. The goal is to walk again. The goal is to throw again. The goal is to do things that you were not able to do because of the pain. That's the— that's Genesis 47 right here. That's Joseph doing physical therapy and not just identifying the pain area. There's work to do. And in this work of restoration, what we recognize is that reconciliation is not a finish line. Reconciliation is not a finish line. And the reason why this is good news that's hard to receive is because we've been framed and formed by our culture, and sometimes even our churches, to think of reconciliation as an event. Reconciliation is just the conversation. It's just the moment of confession. It's just the moment of tearful embrace, and then we're done. But Joseph's story won't allow us to stay right there with the moment, with the conversation, with the tears. He goes beyond that and provides logistics that sustain and restore the relationship. And this is hard. If reconciliation is just a moment, beloved, then we're not there. But on the same side, if we're past the moment, then we haven't experienced the fullness of it. And neither the posture of waiting for the moment or just getting through the moment will actually help to rebuild us. Because reconciliation, first and foremost, is for us. Because you know what happens When we are irreconciled, when we experience just the brokenness, we also tag with that brokenness bitterness that seeps into our heart that says, "I'm not gonna go first, they gotta go first." It tags onto it pride that says, "They're not worth my time or my attention." It causes emotional breakage where we say, "You know what, I just gotta draw some space." some boundaries here, and the boundaries are we can't see each other, we can't talk to each other, we can't do anything with each other, 'cause to be in your presence is too traumatizing. And the healing journey that we must go on when we have these kinds of hardships is not just for the relationship to be restored, it's so that you could be free of the bitterness, free of the pride, free on the other side of the trauma so that you can see it, walk in it, and still not be affected by it. Can you imagine your healing journey looking like that? Can you imagine your reconciled healing journey looking not— not just looking in the face of the person who hurt you, but also blessing them? Not just looking in the face of the person who hurt you and acknowledging the pain that happened, but, but also being and pursuing what it is to be restored in relationship with them. We're all experiencing this kind of brokenness, whether it's in a working relationship with a colleague or maybe a family member, maybe a neighbor in the neighborhood, maybe even across races, across political divides, whatever the divisions there are, we can't imagine being reconciled. Theologian Miroslav Volf writes particularly about ethnic reconciliation out of his own experience in the former Yugoslavia. He understands and knows what it costs, what reconciliation looks like, and he insists it is not a transaction that you complete, it is a posture that you hold over time. In his book "Exclusion and Embrace," he says, "In a world of enmity, self-giving is the risky and hard work of love. I open my arms, I make a movement of the self toward the other, and do not know whether I will be misunderstood, despised, violated, or whether my action will be appreciated, supported, reciprocated. Embrace is grace, and grace is a gamble always. And this is what we see Joseph living into in chapter 47. His arms are open. And in a world that says, when them brothers show up, give them the business, don't let them get too close, when you see a daddy, let him have it up one side and down the other. In a world that says you are right to do so, it is good even for you to do so, Joseph demonstrates another side in another way. And what happens next in this story is easy for us to read past and to overlook. The pagan king Pharaoh, the evil one, does something generous. He blesses Joseph and his entire family. In Genesis chapter 47, Pharaoh says to Joseph, hey, you brought your father and your brothers here with you. The land of Egypt is all before you. Now go and settle them in the best part of the land. And don't just do that, give them a good job. Give them the job over my own livestock. And it's worth pausing here because we tend to rush past Pharaoh. In the larger biblical narrative, this is the villain. He's not a friendly character. He's not somebody that we look to as an example. And yet, in this moment, he becomes extravagantly generous. He goes beyond just tolerating the arrival of Joel's family, he welcomes them and he blesses them. And the text is doing something theologically provocative. It is allowing us to see that God's instruments of provision don't always come in the way that we're ready to receive them. In other words, grace can come from unexpected places. God's grace can come through somebody who looked like an enemy. God's grace can come through somebody who was furthest away from you. God's grace can come through somebody you least expect. And it's a reminder that grace is in the hands of God. Are we ready to receive it? Are we ready to receive the grace that God has to prepare? And Joseph is able to be in this position and relationship with Pharaoh all because, in my estimation, he has reframed the narrative of his life. The narrative of his life was your brothers hated you and they sold you into slavery. The narrative was no one will do right by you. Even when you act good, people will falsely accuse you. The narrative was even when you do good for somebody else, you can't expect them to do good for you. So withhold your goodness, withhold your generosity. You are a victim always in the story. But Joseph reframes the narrative around his life and he says, he says it often and he'll say it again next week in our last message, What was intended for evil has been intended for good. Because of where I am now, you wouldn't be able to experience the blessing because God held me through every hardship. Can you have the perspective in your life that through every hardship God is holding you? God is holding you right now through that hardship. God is holding you right now through that difficulty. God is holding you right now through that brokenness in that relationship. God is holding you right now in that difficult place, that dark place where you are. God is holding you and God is providing for you. What we see in this interaction is that providence has wide borders and that Joseph's suffering did not only produce the capacity to forgive his brothers, it produced the wisdom to recognize God moving through every circumstance, including the ones that didn't look like God's work from the outside. You see, most of us have a mental map of where to experience the grace. It's from the people who share our values. If you don't share our values, I can't accept anything from you. It looks like the people who are on our side, and if you're not on our side, I can't accept anything from you. I'm sorry, you're not on our side. It comes through the channels that we've already accepted as being kind, and if it's not looking like my kind of kindness, then I cannot accept it. And we have walls and barriers between us and the people and places that we will receive goodness from. The difficult family member, perhaps the one who doesn't even share our faith, who does good out of nowhere. The coworker with whom we've had difficulty with suddenly advocates for us. And we can't accept it. We can't frame it. In fact, we even put words around it like, "Well, I guess if God can use a donkey, he can use them too." And by doing so, we diminish what God is doing and what God is at work in. God is in this work of reconciliation. The Apostle Paul, to the church at Corinth, said it like this: All of this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ Jesus and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us a message of reconciliation. In other words, Paul's language is striking. Reconciliation starts with a relationship with God and the outflow of that relationship is in our relationships. In our relationships with people. That God is the one I know who has reconciled me to God's self. And that gives me the strength, that gives me the ability, that gives me the vision, that gives me the possibility of being reconciled even to those with whom I am estranged. Beloved, we are not just recipients of reconciliation. We are, in Christ Jesus, God's agents of reconciliation. And we're called to extend God's grace and reconciliation towards others in the same way that we've received it, because we did not earn it and we cannot repay it. And this is a challenge of Christian faith, that we are not supposed to look like the world. The world creates and lives out division because of the sinfulness and shamefulness and guilt in our own hearts. We want to protect We want to defend, and the Gospel is about releasing. The Gospel is about restoring. The Gospel is about recovering. And my question to all of us, what if we stopped waiting for just a moment of reconciliation, but started to build or rebuild the life of reconciliation? Joseph says to his father Jacob, who says, "I'm ready to die," and go on, he says, "No, no." We're going to continue to work this thing out, and I'm going to be a blessing. And the text says 17 years. 47:28, Jacob lived 17 years beyond that time. 17 years, an opportunity to be restored in relationship. 17 years in order to be reconciled with his son. And his— by the way, his other sons, because Jacob didn't know, how did they lose? How did he lose his youngest son Joseph? Oh, it was your other sons that sold him into slavery. It was your own. It was his own. And so now Jacob has to also deal with the discomfort with his own sons who sold their brother into slavery and kept the lie for more than 2 decades. He's experiencing all kinds of heaviness and brokenness, and we don't know how God was at work in those 17 years, but we do know after the brokenness it provided an opportunity for reconciliation. Beloved, can we hold out hope for reconciliation? Even though it looks dark right now, can we hold out hope for it? Shala's grandmother, Gam Gam, in Urbana is a green thumb. She is like— she can grow anything, anywhere, at any time. And occasionally she will give us tulips, one of Shala's favorite flowers. She'll give us tulips and she'll give us the little bulb, you know, the little That's what they call it, right? Bulb, ball, bulb. Okay, so she gives us the, you know, the bulb. And, you know, springtime is when I'm ready to do yard work. Yeah, Debbie, let's go plant right now. Let's go plant the bulbs now. How many of you know you don't plant tulips in spring? I didn't know this early on. I'm planting them like, what's wrong? How come they're not coming up? What's going on? Like, because you planted them in the wrong time. When are you supposed to plant tulips? In the fall, in the late fall, when things start to die and to decay. And all late fall, all winter long, you see no evidence of the tulip. You see no evidence of what was buried. You see no evidence of what is going to be beautiful until those little leaves start to come out. That's what they call them, right? Leaves. All right, help me out here. And then the thing in between the leaf What is that called? A stem. Okay, somebody called it a shoot earlier, so I don't know— stem, shoot, that thing that comes up in the middle. And then you start to see that flower and the petals, and then they start to open, and then it's beautiful. Beloved, some of us in our reconciling journey are in October when it's just buried. We're in November when we don't see any evidence. We're in December when it's cold and it's dark and it looks like it's forgotten. We're in January and it's still even colder outside. We're in February and it looks like it's starting to warm up, but we get that sneaky, you know, kind of weather in October and it's like, no, no, no, it's still gonna snow in March. I've got this picture. It snowed last week, and in the midst of the snow, the leaves are bursting forth for them. Tulips to start to emerge. And beloved, what if reconciliation is like that? That for some of us it's in the dark place, but the shoots haven't come up yet. And what grandma would say when I'm ready to give up on these things is she says, don't dig up the bulbs, baby. They still got work to do. They still got work to do. Don't pull it out because the work is not done. If you're not reconciled, That means there's something still happening underneath that God wants to bring to your awareness, that God still wants to do in your life, that God wants you to become aware of the emotion and how to heal from it, the pain and how to grow from it, the awkwardness and how to still live in it. Because this is not the end of the story. Let me tell you something. The story doesn't just not end at the moment of reconciliation, the confession and the tears. It doesn't just end when Joseph provides a blessing to his father and his father's children, his siblings. The way the story ends in this chapter 47, Jacob blesses Pharaoh twice, and then he blesses Joseph twice. The older patriarchs in this Hebrew Ancient Near Eastern culture, they would bless their children, and generally it's the oldest of the boys who received the blessing. But Jacob already broke that mold. Jacob had a twin named Esau and swindled his twin brother who came out first just a few seconds earlier out of his blessing. The younger became the one who was blessed. And so when Joseph comes along in the scene, the youngest boy of Jacob's children, he blesses the younger. He does to him. He says, "No, no, no. It's not the oldest, it's the younger." God's got something here in the younger, it's in the latter. And at the end of Jacob's life, he brings his sons together. This is where we start to see the 12 tribes of Israel come together, all of the sons. But you know, there isn't one tribe named Joseph. Why isn't there a tribe named Joseph? Joseph had 2 sons, and when Joseph brought those 2 sons to Jacob, Jacob blessed both of them. As the offspring. The blessing that Joseph was supposed to receive from Father Jacob is now a double portion. Ephraim and Manasseh are a double portion of blessing from the father, which is to say this: the blessing you've been waiting on will be double. The pain you've experienced, the healing you're going to experience from this will be double. The trauma you've endured. And on the other side will be a double healing. The healing will be above, exceeding, and beyond what you could think or imagine. This is what happens in Joseph's story. That which was lost has been found, recovered, and restored, and a double portion of it returned. And not just to me, but the generation behind me. So what might this look like for you? I don't know. But I do know it begins with this: by not withholding that which is in your ability to give. God, the healing journey for all of us is going to be a little bit different. This isn't to say that every Pharaoh in your life you need to receive and bless. It takes great discernment to know, Lord, do I extend myself here or not? Because the place that the Lord wants you to get to in your healing journey is that wherever you go, whatever room you step into, you step into that room whole and healed, and the trauma of the past no longer has a grip on you. In fact, you can give exceeding abundantly even to the people and places that have done you harm. Can you bow your heads just for a moment? Because I know this is a challenging message for us to hear and to discern. God, what is it that you have? What is the invitation? What is the message? The first message is to understand and know that we are reconciled to God in Christ Jesus, not by our work but by God's. God demonstrated that love that reconciling work. And that there are people and places and names and stories that come to mind even now that are hard to look at face to face. But through the grace and courage of the Holy Spirit, we're able to face it. And it takes discernment to know how to show up. May the Lord give wisdom and and how to step for what is possible. In the strong name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.