Where IS God?

"As for the people, Joseph made slaves of them from one end of Egypt to the other."

I don't ever remember studying, hearing of even reading that line until I took what was then called an "Old Testament" course at the University of Chicago. In fact as a child and young adult I remember occasionally wondering how the Jews came to be slaves in Egypt. What I remember deciding or being told, I'm not sure which, is that the Egyptians "enslaved them" in the "usual" way.

'Taint so! It was Canaanite Joseph, ancestor to two of the 12 tribes of Israel who enslaved the people from the land of Canaan along with most of the population of North Africa and the middle east.

Who Knew? How many of you knew that?

Talk about a world shaped by unintended consequences!

Last week's Genesis lesson told us of the plot that led to Joseph arriving in Egypt. This week we are near the other end of the story which is contained in chapters 37, and 39 through 50 of the book of Genesis.

For any who have not read it in recent memory, I highly commend it to you. It has drama, sex, a little violence, tension, unjust imprisonment, some sentimentality, a family reunion

The authors of the oldest existing version first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures - the Torah or "law of Moses" -- probably wrote around the sixth or fifth century BCE. These books tell the faith history of the Jewish people in sagas and stories of their past illuminated by their faith. The story of Joseph is generally believed to describe events taking place in about 1500 BCE. "GOD," Joseph is reported to say, "God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God; God has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. "It was not you who threw me down the hole but God."

Now think about this for just a minute.

If I were thrown down a hole by my siblings, then sold by these same relatives into slavery, and put unjustly into prison - even if I finally ended up as one of the President's in-crowd, I don't think that I would attribute the hole, slavery and prison to God.

On the other hand, I certainly don't think that if all of my ancestors had been manipulated into slavery in a foreign land by an outcast sibling in exchange for survival rations, that I would be writing stories about how being sold into slavery was part of God's grand plan - even if the family had eventually ended up in Columbia.

Would you?

Did God do this to Joseph?

I don't know! The authors of these stories certainly believed that God could. For the ancient Jews who put together this the Book of Genesis, the book of beginnings, God was to be found in all of the mysterious and inexplicable events of life. And certainly the convoluted connections of Joseph's story is mysterious.

In this age of "enlightenment" the need for mysterious places in which to see and connect with that which is bigger than, outside of, and transcendent of our selves has led hundreds of thousands of "mainline Christians" out of the churches and into the Celestine Prophecy, Edgar Cacey.

I went through such a period.

But at one point I came to believe that such perspectives were too limited to explain the pain of life and that they were unavailable to those whose lives are filled - through no fault of their own -- with poverty and violence.

Claims of God's sovereignty and power are alien to - even in direct conflict with -- the experience, mood and attitude of our techno-consumption culture.

At the conclusion of last week's reflection on the beginning of the Joseph story I asked: What it might mean if God didn't really manipulate individual lives, the weather, the geography?

I do not believe that I could ever come to accept that "It was not you who threw me down the hole but God."

Where, indeed, is God today. God, I think, is where God has always been. It is we, people, who throughout our brief stay on this planet have tried to identify and communicate God's presence in music, stories, rituals, poetry, painting, and billions and billions of words in every language words, it is we and our perspectives that have changed.

So . . . What is our Scripture telling us?

When I look behind our scripture, try to listen to what our spiritual ancestors were trying to communicate. I hear stories that affirm that God's purpose is to create real newness, true Genesis, unexpected and unforeseeable freshness that negates the power of the past to control the present and opens new futures. I do not believe that the manipulation of minute-to-minute events that is the message of these stories. What I hear are stories reflecting the conviction that God is to be found in the events that bring, sustain, and redeem life.

The stories of Joseph assert that regardless of the pains and trials of life, God's purpose is totally, utterly and conclusively gracious. Israel's faith, expressed in Torah, is that God wills life and that God is remarkably resourceful against every threat of death.

We are reminded that our role and the meaning for our own lives is to be found in life-giving acts. But we are also cautioned that our efforts to seek, clutch, manipulate and even "create" life too often lead us to enslave those we love.

This story affirms that God's purpose and actions are hidden and mysterious.

There is no hint about "how" it happens. But the evidence of the indomitable nature of creation and new possibility is all around.

And finally, this story affirms that God's purposes are worked out in the concreteness of our world - not in some future pie in the sky time - but in the instants of now -- today and yesterday and tomorow.

The lives of Joseph, Tamar, Hagar, and Jacob, me and you may, as our Scripture proclaims: have been willed by God from before the instant of what we have labeled as the "big bang".

But it is in the momentary, both momentous and minute - the "now" of existence - the songs of birds, the collisions of planets and stars, the seeds that fall from trees and flowers, the moments of the life of Joseph and our lives that the way of God can be known, seen and experienced.

If I look at my life from the world of the Genesis editors I might well conclude that God sent my childhood abuser so that I would have the blessing of energy to fight "the system" for justice for those the society sees as "small" insignificant and forgettable.

When I look back on my life from the world this day I see God's life giving presence acted out by my Grandmother, a few friends, a pet that I could talk to, therapists and friends and lovers - holding out the possibility that life could be. Did God "make" Joseph's siblings throw Joseph down that hole?

Did God send Joseph to Egypt to be the architect of an economic system that would enslave all of the tribes of Canaan?

From my place and my time in the tapestry of creation it is not possible for me to say that.

But what I do find in this story is the continuing affirmation that God's power and purpose and presence are alive and real and present in this world.

What I hear is a timeless affirmation that in living our lives we can be confident that the same God that loved the universe into existence and brought life and hope to the people of the middle east out of drought and economic oppression -