Goodness is Stronger than Evil

Delivered at Our Redeemer’s Lutheran Church, Proper NL 1-03/Pentecost 15
Text: Gen 39.1-23; Mt 5.11-12

In January of 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, killing over 200,000 people and injuring over 300,000 more. Among the dead was a Lutheran seminarian named Ben Larson. Ben had been in Haiti with his wife Renee and his cousin Jon, working with a Haitian boy’s school in Port-au-Prince caring for people in need. During the quake, all three were inside a concrete structure that collapsed. Jon and Renee walked out, and Ben did not.

When they came back, everybody thanked God for their safe return. Everybody believed that God had protected them. There were also many who wondered why God did not save Ben, why Ben was not protected by God’s care. More than that, why had God not protected the 200,000 other people who died in that disaster? The question left lingering after this earthquake was why God would save some and not others, why God would allow anything like this to happen at all. Where is God in tragedy such as this?

This is the question into which we are invited when we read the story of Joseph. Joseph is a man who, we are told, is blessed by God; and yet, he suffers terrible misfortune. Joseph is the favorite son of Jacob, who has 11 other sons (and one daughter) besides. Jacob’s favoritism makes Joseph’s 10 older brothers so jealous that they decide to kill him. Eventually, the settle for selling him into slavery. Joseph is sold to the Egyptian Potiphar, and when things finally seem to be going well again, he is falsely accused of a crime by his master’s wife and thrown into prison.

The story shows us that God’s blessing does not protect us from evil or harm. We say in our prayers and sing in our hymns that God spares us from danger, but the reality is that as followers of Jesus, we are no more or less likely to be hit by a bus, win the lottery, be diagnosed with cancer or die in an earthquake than anyone else on God’s earth. If the benefit of worshipping God is supposed to be safety, then we may as well give it up.

As we learned last week, God does not bless us to make us happy. This is another way of saying that God’s blessing is not for our benefit or our safety. God’s blessing is for the benefit of the whole world. From the beginning of creation, sin has been at work in the world and it will continue to be until the end of time. God is working in the world to overcome sin, but not by destroying or defeating it; we learned this from the story of Noah. Instead, God is working to overcome sin in the world through blessing. That is the blessing that God gave to Noah, to Abraham and Sarah, to Jacob, and to Joseph—that no matter what might befall them, God would remain with them.

The bad things that happen to Joseph are the result not of God’s plan or God’s failure to protect him. What happens to Joseph is the result of sin—the sins of his brothers and the sins of Potiphar’s wife. The same is true for us. The cause of all evil in the world is sin, even when it comes to earthquakes.

Just over a month after the 7.0 quake in Haiti that destroyed entire cities, an even stronger earthquake, measuring 8.8, struck Chile. A total of 723 people died. The reason why such an even bigger earthquake had fewer than 1% of the casualties of the smaller one is poverty, a problem of human sin. In Haiti, where poverty is almost universal, people lived in poorly constructed houses and had less access to emergency response and public sanitation following the quake. In Chile, on the other hand, buildings were well-constructed, the government had the money to finance disaster relief, and there was already a reliable infrastructure to support the survivors.

Sin is the root of our problems, and this is bad news for us, because sin dwells within us. Each of us, no matter how virtuous, harbors immense power for destruction, and each of us has been and will continue to be a means for sin to corrupt God’s creation through violence, hatred, ignorance, oppression, bigotry, and apathy. And yet, in spite of our culpability, God’s blessing to us is the promise that this sin cannot and will not separate us from God’s presence, and that no evil we commit will ever be beyond God’s power to forgive it and create good from it.

This is the story of Calvary. Jesus did not come to die because God planned it that way.  He died as a direct result of our own selfishness and our need for control. He did not die for our sins but because of them. He did not take our justly deserved punishment for us; instead we unjustly punished him for bringing us God’s love. Jesus’ crucifixion was our outright rejection of God and God’s kingdom. His death is the greatest evil ever to occur on the face of the earth, and it was committed by the very people he came to save. But, like Joseph’s brothers, what we intended for evil, God used for good.

This is the blessing God has given us, the promise that God had made with us: that there is nothing in heaven or earth, nothing we could ever do or fail to do that will ever overcome God’s love for us and God’s power to create good from evil. Our ultimate rejection of God became God’s ultimate victory over the sin that crucified Jesus. That’s what resurrection is: as much as it is a dead man returning to life and walking out of a tomb, it is sin being turned to God’s purposes, just as Jesus’ death became an instrument of God’s life. God’s blessing is that even our most grievous sins against God and God’s kingdom can and will ultimately be used to accomplish God’s own will.

Because of God’s promise, even though Ben Larson and hundreds of thousands of others died in that quake in Haiti—an event which can only be described as a tragedy of the highest order—what is following that tragedy is serving God’s purpose. Ben’s death devastated his family and his community, but I have seen firsthand how, along with the pain, they have also received blessing. His absence is painfully felt by the Church he loved and served, and yet his ministry continues even in death as more people learn about him and his work through Jon and Renee. Ben is still preaching gospel of Jesus. From unspeakable tragedy—great evil—by God’s power, great good has come.

This is what it means to rest in the presence and the blessing of God. I does not mean we will be safe from harm or spared from pain. In fact, we may sometimes even suffer on account of God’s kingdom; but in the end, none of that can separate us from God, because God is everywhere and in everything, even the suffering and injustice of an innocent man dying an unjust and torturous death on a cross. God’s blessing is that there is nothing that can happen to us—not being sold into slavery by your own brothers, not being unjustly imprisoned, not even being killed senselessly in an earthquake—that God cannot use to bless the world through us.

God doesn’t orchestrate our suffering for some greater ends, and our pain is not a sign of God’s abandonment. God is as busy at work creating now as God was at the beginning of the world. Before there was anything, God created order from chaos, light and matter and life came from nothing; now God is busy creating good out of evil, blessing out of sin.

We—God’s children, called and claimed by God through the waters of baptism and nourished by the flesh and blood of Christ in the Eucharist—have been chosen and equipped like the first humans in God’s garden. We have been given the task of assisting in God’s work of creation. We are flawed, but God uses us anyway, just like Joseph’s brothers, and Potiphar and his wife, and the chief jailer, and the Pharisees and chief priests; through us—even through our failures—God is blessing the world.

The gift of God’s blessing—the blessing called grace—is that when we try and fail, we can try again, knowing that God continues to love us and use us to bless God’s world. We have been freed from the consequences of failure by Christ’s death and resurrection. Even our failure can be resurrected by God’s power and used for God’s purposes, and through us, all the world is blessed. That is why we are here this morning, why we worship this God of love. We have come to hear the words of God’s steadfast promise, to hear God’s invitation to us to be a blessing to the world, and hopefully, to accept that invitation.