Joseph Permalink

The Joseph Stories: Pride and Providence

Introduction:

This series takes a creative approach to the Joseph stories. Each day’s reflection imagines what one of the characters might have written in both their diary and their memoirs about the events in that day’s Scripture passage. While this approach sometimes requires us to “fill in the blanks” a bit with regard to what the characters are thinking and feeling, every effort has been made to stay as close to the Bible’s details as possible. The diary/memoir approach underscores how we often perceive—or don’t perceive—God’s hand in our lives.

 

Pride and Providence

Read: Genesis 37:1-24

Come now, let us kill him…and we shall see what will become of his dreams.

(v. 20 NRSV)

If Joseph had written in his diary as he was being carted off to Egypt, what might he have said? DIARY: Was it my fault Dad always liked me best? Was it my fault he gave me that cool robe? Was it my fault God sent me those awesome dreams? There I was, minding my own business—and following Dad’s orders to go check on my annoying brothers—and what did they do? They stripped off my beautiful robe and threw me in a pit! I thought they were just messing with me, but the next thing I knew I was on my way to Egypt as a slave! I knew my brothers disliked me, but who knew they’d stoop to this?

If Joseph had written in his memoirs years after this experience, what might he have said? MEMOIR: In retrospect, I guess I was kind of a brat. I probably shouldn’t have told my brothers about the dreams. And while the robe Dad gave me was beautiful, I can understand why my brothers resented it. It still stings that they hated me so much that they went to such lengths to get rid of me. But looking back on it, I can see God using their hatred and my arrogance to prepare the way for our salvation. I’m not glad it happened—but I am glad God is so good at turning lemons into lemonade.

Prayer: Help us to trust your providence, God, even when we are in the midst of excruciating situations.

 Christmas Permalink

A Christmas Meditation on Psalm 39

This may not sound like a very “seasonal” psalm, but in fact, it is!

I refer you to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—remembering especially the part where the Ghost of Christmas Future takes Scrooge on a tour of the graveyard. There’s nothing like the site of your own name on a headstone to make you sufficiently sensible of conditions!

The author of Psalm 39 actually asks God to give him that kind of a moment. “Teach me to know my end,” he prays. “Let me know how fleeting my life is.”

That’s a brave prayer. When we recognize this, it helps us cut the psalmist some slack when, elsewhere in the psalm, he seems to drift perilously close to despair. I’m thinking of verse eleven, for instance, when he compared God to a “consuming moth.” Or even better, at the end of the psalm, when he winds up his prayer by telling God to “turn your gaze away from me, that I may smile again, before I depart and am no more” (v. 13).

Nobody’s ever going to needlepoint that!

But we would do well to mark well that brave prayer in verse four. The fact of our own frailty—our own finitude—is a lesson we have to be carefully taught. And once we learn it, it’s both clarifying and freeing. It’s clarifying because it urges us to “work for the night is coming.” But it’s freeing because it reminds us that our hope is not in our own accomplishments, but in what God has accomplished on our behalf. As the psalmist puts it in what is probably the most needlepoint-worthy verse in the entire psalm: “My hope is in you” (v. 7)

That said—God bless us every one!