Seeing God's Hand

Genesis 40:1-23

October 7, 2018 (World Communion) • Mount Pleasant UMC

I’ve been to prison once. Pastor Rick and Stan Fisher and some others go every other week—for ministry, of course! Two or three weeks ago, our staff was having our monthly lunch together when the server overheard Pastor Rick say, “This is my big meal for today. I have to go to jail tonight.” The server said, “Really?” And when we left, he told Pastor Rick “Good luck.” Somewhere out there is a server who still thinks Rick is in jail today! But I’ve only been to prison once. In preparation for a ministry being launched by Prison Fellowship in the Michigan City prison, pastors and lay leaders from all around the area were invited in for a tour, to visit with the chaplain, and to worship with the inmates. It was a humbling experience, and I have never forgotten what it felt like to have those steel doors slam shut behind me. Three sets of them, if I remember right. And the next one would not be opened until the one behind you had been shut and secured. You were locked in, no doubt about it, and you weren’t going to get out without someone’s permission. Someone else had to step into the situation if I was going to be released.

Now, I was fairly certain I was only there for the day, so I went about my day without much anxiety. So while I’ve been to prison, I really don’t know what it feels like to stay there; I know we have some folks in our congregation who do, who can truly understand the sorts of feelings Joseph would have been going through when Potiphar sent him to prison—for a crime he did not commit. This morning, we’re continuing our series of sermons on the life of Joseph, the dreamer, a young man who, now in his twenties, has already been nearly killed by his brothers, sold into slavery, and wrongfully accused of attempted rape. Because of that last incident, which we talked about last week, he was put into prison, but you’ll remember it’s not just any prison. It was what we might call a minimum-security prison, a place where political prisoners and those who get on the wrong side of the pharaoh might end up. And it just so happens that such a thing does take place. While Joseph is in this prison, having been given a level of authority by the warden, two people are added to the prison: the cupbearer and the baker for the pharaoh.

Before we get to their story, though, let’s back up a moment and consider what Joseph might have been feeling. Remember, Joseph at an early age had great promise, great hope. He had those dreams, the ones that seemed to tell him he was going to be great, powerful, important. As he looks around the prison, he has to be wondering how it all came to this. How did this happen? Where did all those promises go? The dreams he had once held onto must have seemed to belong to another life, a long time ago. The nights in prison were undoubtedly long, and the months seemed to never end. Even though Joseph seems to have a better grasp on God’s presence in his life at this point than he did earlier in his life, he still has to be facing some level of discouragement.

You’ve been there. We all have. Moments come when life just isn’t all that we had hoped it would be. There come into our lives seasons of discouragement, seasons when it seems like we’re stuck in a prison, whether it’s one of our own making or one caused by someone else. Sometimes our discouragement comes from dryness—spiritual dryness. Some of our spiritual forefathers and foremothers called this the “dark night of the soul,” when it seems like God is nowhere to be found. It’s not necessarily because there is sin in your life, though one time I shared in worship that I was going through a time like this and I immediately got a message from someone in the church who told me exactly that, that I had sin in my life and that’s why God wasn’t around, and more than that, she knew exactly what my sin was. So there’s that! Sometimes it’s nothing we’ve done. In fact, it may be evidence of God’s trust in us. There are times when we need to learn to depend only on God, and so God allows us to go through desert times so that we will learn we can’t do it on our own. We can’t live this life in our own strength. Such times also teach us that spiritual feelings can come and go without changing our relationship with God. We walk, after all, by faith and not by sight (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:7; Seamands, Living With Your Dreams, pg. 77). Discouragement can come in the form of dryness.

It can also come when you’re seeking direction. There have been times in my life when I’ve asked God to just write across the sky what I should do. Should I turn right or left, make this choice or that one? Just tell me! Clearly! Some people say they hear directly from God as to what they should do, and that’s great, but I never have. Times like that for me have only been resolved through a lot of wrestling in prayer and through conversation with trusted friends. The difficult part is remaining open to God’s direction. An architect once said that most people who came to him presumably for house plans had really already designed their homes. What they wanted was for him to sanction the plans they had already made. That’s the way we often are with God; we ask him to bless our plans rather than to bless us with his plans. In the midst of that struggle can come times of discouragement (cf. Seamands 78-79). We don’t do well with the struggle.

We can probably all name times when we have felt like we were in the prison of discouragement. Joseph was inside a literal prison, and though tempted to be discouraged, it seems he managed to rise above it and serve those who were around him in the prison. Or, as one author put it, “Joseph was inside the dungeon but he never let the dungeon get inside him” (Seamands 81). Because he has “trusted prisoner status,” he is given a special assignment by someone who knows he can be trusted. Potiphar, captain of the guard, bodyguard to Pharaoh, former owner of Joseph, asks that Joseph take special care of two new prisoners: the cupbearer and the baker (40:4; cf. Briscoe, Communicator’s Commentary: Genesis, pg. 325), and Joseph does just that. They get to know each other well enough that one morning, Joseph can tell something is wrong. He asks them, “Why do you look so sad today?” (40:7). As if being in prison wasn’t enough of a reason to be sad (cf. Briscoe 326)! But apparently they looked even more sad than usual on this morning, and there was a reason. Both of them had dreams, similar dreams, the night before but they did not know what they meant.

I need to say a word about ancient dream interpretation. As we talked about a couple of weeks ago, ancients believed that God speaks to us through dreams. The ancient Egyptians certainly believed that the gods spoke to them in their dreams, but they did not believe that the gods provided interpretations. Instead, it was up to them to figure it out themselves. So there was an industry that grew up around dream interpretation. There are, still existing, ancient Egyptian “dream books” that were used by these interpreters, sort of like a diagnostic manual where you look up the symptoms and match them to the disease. Only in this case, you would look through a list of symbols, read a collection of “sample dreams,” and from there make your best guess as to what the dream might mean (Walton, Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament, pg. 71). Some people did this professionally and others unofficially (Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone—Part Two, pg. 143). And so the cupbearer and the baker have these very vivid dreams. It seems obvious “the gods” are trying to tell them something, but they’re upset because in the prison there are no official (or unofficial) dream interpreters. They’re just left with these vivid images, and no one to help them.

Or so they think. You see, Joseph has a different worldview. Joseph understands dreams in a different way than they do. He knows that interpretations don’t come from a book, or even from some sort of trained professional. “Do not interpretations belong to God?” he says. “Tell me your dreams” (40:8). Even before they start telling him what they saw, he is deflecting any attention away from himself. Whatever he has to offer, he knows, comes from God and not from himself or any “knowledge” he might possess. If he is able to be helpful, it will only be because God helped him. So he asks them: tell me your dreams.

Now, we read the dreams, and Joseph’s interpretation. I’m not going to go through all the details. We know that it turns out well for one and—uh—not so well for the other. The cupbearer is restored and the baker is executed. The only time we get a sense of Joseph’s discouragement, his discontent, is when he makes one request of the cupbearer: “When all goes well with you,” he says, “remember me and show me kindness; mention me to Pharaoh and get me out of this prison” (40:14). One request—the cupbearer had one job—and it’s a request that, as soon as he is out of prison, he forgets about. Most prisoners work hard to forget what happened in prison; they’re anxious to put that part of their lives behind them. But those who remember can make a real difference. Chuck Colson was arrested and sent to jail for his part in the famous Watergate scandal. In the time between the scandal becoming public and his going to jail, Colson became a Christian, and many in the press were anxious to prove it was a “jailhouse conversion,” concocted to try to make the justice system go easy on him. Colson had, after all, once been quoted as saying he would walk over his own grandmother to help President Nixon get reelected. There was a reason he was known as Nixon’s “hatchet man.” Colson found his faith tested behind bars, but he focused his energy while in prison on ministering to fellow inmates. When he was released, a large prisoner named Archie came up to him. “Hey Colson,” he said, “You’ll be out of here soon. What are you going to do for us?” Colson looked at Archie and said, “I’ll help in some way. I’ll never forget you guys or this stinking place.” “Bull!” Archie yelled back, “I’ve seen big shots like you come and go. They all say the same things while they’re inside. Then they get out and forget us fast. There ain’t nobody cares about us. Nobody!” (Colson, Life Sentence, pg. 24). Colson never forgot those words, and they were ringing in his ears in August 1976 when he filed papers to incorporate a new non-profit ministry, Prison Fellowship. Because he had been there, he knew the deep needs of prisoners to come to know Jesus, to find hope. Colson remembered.

But the cupbearer did not. Once he got out of his prison garb and back into the routine of tasting the wine for Pharaoh, he forgot all about Joseph and the others he met in the king’s prison. Maybe he remembered for a few days; perhaps he was looking for the right time to bring it up to the most powerful man in the world at the time. But as days passed and he couldn’t find an opening in the conversation, he gave up. He forgot. For two long years, he forgot. And for two long years, Joseph stays in prison. I can’t help but wonder how the story went from his side of the cell door. How many days did he wake up and go to the cell door, expecting to see someone there with his release papers? How many times did he tell the warden, “I’m glad to do my job, but I’m going to be out of here soon. You better train my replacement”? How long was it into the two years before he gave up and stopped expecting something to happen? The cupbearer forgets about Joseph, and he spends two more years in prison, which puts him back in the prison of discouragement again, this time due to disappointment. Being forgotten. Beginning to feel like nobody cares. Feeling alone and lonely. You’ve been there. You’ve lived in that prison. You’ve watched as someone else was given a promotion at work that you deserved. Maybe you’ve been there longer, worked harder, and proven yourself but then the new hire is given more responsibility and more pay. Hasn’t anyone noticed you? Or you’ve had a friend you cared for greatly just stop talking to you, turn to other people and maybe even lie about why they stopped returning your calls and your texts. You’ve been in a crowd of people and felt as if no one even knew you were there. You’ve had your hopes set on this or that happening, and then it doesn’t and your dreams have been crushed. A thousand other scenarios—were there time, we could go through the worship center this morning and ask you each to tell your story about the prison of disappointment. You’ve been there. You know what it’s like, and you know how Joseph felt.

We don’t like to admit to others that we go through those times, partly because there’s this idea in our culture that “good Christians don’t struggle.” That’s a lie, friends. That’s a lie from the pit of hell, and any preacher who tells you that is not preaching the Gospel. We follow a crucified savior, one who went through torture and death itself to save us. The cross was not a “feel good” moment and we don’t follow “feel good” savior. We follow one who, Scripture says, was tested in every way we have been or ever will be (cf. Hebrews 4:15). He knows what it’s like to be discouraged. He knows what it’s like to have a close friend betray him. He knows what it’s like to be misunderstood. And he shows us what it means to trust our heavenly Father while still in the dungeon.

So does Joseph. You see, there is nothing wasted in God’s economy. We’ll see that to be true in Joseph’s life in the next couple of weeks, and we will see how God is using this time to shape Joseph into a man he can use later. Joseph is learning how critical it is to trust that God’s hand is still working even when we can’t see it. Author Stephen Elliott puts it this way: “Trust…is seeing the hand of God before you can figure out what He is going to write.” That’s something we can all learn better! At least, that’s something I need to learn better. I don’t know about you, but I struggle with trust, especially trusting things I can’t see. Yes, I have control issues sometimes! All those “trust exercises” that groups do—like fall backwards and we’ll catch you or some such nonsense—I really struggle to do those. I’ve led them, but I don’t like to do them. That’s what being a leader’s all about, right? That became very clear to me several years ago when we were on a whitewater rafting trip with the youth group, back when I was a youth pastor. Along the way, there was this huge rock, miles up in the air (okay, maybe not really miles, but it felt like it) that people would jump off of into the rampaging river. (I may be exaggerating!) Anyway, I wasn’t going to do it until my youth started nagging me and daring me to do it—and you know what power a dare has on a weak mind! So I climbed out of the relative safety of our raft, up the side of the rock and—well, you can take a look at what happened, because the rafting company had someone there to video it!

VIDEO: Whitewater Rafting

Trust is hard, and sometimes it takes having everything else you’ve come to depend on taken away for our spiritual eyes to be opened, so that we can see the hand of God working. That’s what happened to Joseph. For two long years, he had to trust that God was still working, doing something in his heart and his life to fulfill the dreams that he still believed God had given him. He had to learn to see God’s hand writing even though he had no idea what God was writing. Sometimes it takes years in the dungeon to learn to trust.

Now, I’m not going to stand here and lie to you and say I have it all together, but there are areas of my life where I do trust more than others. This afternoon, Bishop Trimble will be here to share with the District some information about the future of our denomination. Since 1972, and probably before that, our church has been wrestling with differing ideas over the topic of human sexuality, and while that is what counselors call the “presenting issue,” the deeper issue is how we interpret Scripture and what we believe about certain passages. The United Methodist Church is a “big tent,” and we have a lot of varied perspectives on a lot of topics. But I think John Wesley would have wanted it that way. He had the notion that those things that don’t strike at the core of Christianity should be things we can disagree and even argue kindly about. But we seem to have come to a point where many on both (or all) sides of the issue feel like they can no longer get along and be in a church together. So for the last three years, a special commission has been appointed by the Bishops to study the matter and bring recommendations to a special called General Conference, and that will take place next February. In your bulletin this morning is a bookmark with the names of the delegates from Indiana so you can pray for them by name over the next few months; they have a huge responsibility. But here’s the connection to Joseph. Occasionally, I have people ask me if I’m worried about the future of the United Methodist Church. Am I fearful? Am I worried that I might not have a job? And there are a lot of things I worry about and many things that wake me up at night, but that’s not one of them. Nearly twenty years ago, when some of this started erupting in the church, I worried about it. I sent some time in the prison of fear over the future. But I’ve learned in the years since to trust that God’s hand is writing the story. And I need to believe that his hand is steady even if I can’t see what he is writing. Will the United Methodist Church break up or dissolve? Maybe. I don’t know. But I do know this: no matter what happens, God is not done with us yet, and sometimes we have to go through painful situations to see something new birthed.

So let me ask this: where do you struggle with trusting that God’s hand is at work? Where do you need to be able to see his hand working beyond the prison you’re in right now?

Centuries after Joseph found himself stuck in prison, there were eleven men in an upper room just inside Jerusalem who, though they were unaware of it, were about to be thrown into a prison of disappointment and discouragement. The night before Jesus’ crucifixion, they gathered with him in a borrowed room for what was, as far as they knew, just another Passover meal. They had gone through these meals annually for all of their lives, and they had no reason at first to suspect anything was different on this night. But it was. Everything was about to change. Even as Jesus served them the bread and the cup that evening, forces were moving to arrest Jesus and condemn him to death. That’s why Jesus served them the bread and the cup, not just to remember an ancient event in their history, but to give them something tangible to remember that even when things seem the darkest, they could still trust him. Communion is a reminder that even in the darkest, most difficult and trying times, God’s hand is still at work. Communion reminds us again that though we may feel forgotten and alone, God’s hand is still writing the story. Communion is an act of building trust.

This morning is World Communion Sunday, a day when brothers and sisters around the world gather at the communion table, a day when we remember that there are brothers and sisters in much more dire straits and dangerous situations than we are. Some brothers and sisters are going without food. Some gather at the table at the risk of their lives. Some are in actual prisons. The book of Hebrews says this: “Remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering” (13:3). And so as we gather at the table this morning, we allow their example and their faith to inspire ours. On this World Communion Sunday, we gather at the table, looking for God’s hand and trusting that he is working even when we can’t see it. Maybe especially then. Let’s pray.