The Sauntering Pilgrim

“Sometime it’s purty hard to do the right thing,” an old philosopher once said. “You don’t always know what’s gonna come of it.” Bits of folk wisdom like that, from cartoonist J.P. Alley, used to appear most days alongside the news in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. From 1914 to 1968 they provided a humanizing balance to reports of everything happening in the world – the Great Depression, two world wars, Korea and Vietnam, the ongoing struggle for civil rights, the assassination of a president, and all the rest.

We could use wisdom like that right about now. A lot of people are understandably in despair today. I could try listing reasons for that and barely scratch the surface, so I won’t start; you can see plenty of reasons for despair coming daily, hourly, out of Washington. If J.P. Alley were still drawing his cartoons, I expect he’d have something to say about how difficult it is to judge the action that’s wrong, because you don’t always know what’s going to come of it.

Well, J.P. Alley’s not around any longer – he died in 1968 – but we have other wisdom to draw on, a story that’s been in our scriptures for more than thirty-five centuries. It’s the story of Joseph, son of Jacob, and how he was first threatened with death and then sold into slavery by his jealous brothers; how he rose to a position of great power and influence while captive in Egypt; how his stewardship of agricultural resources saved his nation from seven years of famine; and how, in today’s reading (Gen. 45:3-11, 15), he used his position to save his brothers, the same ones who sold him into slavery, and their families from starvation and death.

When Joseph’s brothers came to him two years into the famine begging for food from the Egyptian stores, Joseph could have taken his revenge: he could have pronounced judgment and sent them away emptyhanded. Instead, so the story goes, he saw that something bigger was at work in his experience, something of God. In selling me into captivity, he told his brothers, “God sent me before you to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God” (vv. 7-8). How difficult it is to judge the action that’s wrong, because you don’t always know what’s going to come of it.

Joseph must have despaired more than once from when his brothers betrayed him to the time they came to him for help, and that’s not a bad thing. Despair is not something to be ignored or avoided; it’s an emotion that tells us something. All of the strong emotions tell us something about what’s going on around us and within us, and they prepare us to respond. Despair, too, has its uses. If we pay attention to it, it can help us let go of illusions and deal with the reality of our situation. Despair forces us to deal with the darkness of loss and disillusionment, and it opens us to the new thing that waits on the other side of the darkness.

Joseph could never have foreseen what awaited him when, as a boy, strangers led him off in shackles to a foreign land. I believe he could not have known, until his brothers arrived, the truth of what St. Paul would write thirteen centuries later, “that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28).

I don’t know what’s on the other side of today’s darkness and despair, but it’s likely to include more hard work and less comfort, at least initially. But the history of our faith tells us that God is a reconciling God, reuniting a human family that has been broken asunder, and bringing all of our experiences together to make a rich, whole, perfect life.

To find a new world or a new life, to create a new one from the wreckage of an old one, maybe we first need to have lost one. According to Joseph Campbell, “We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.” I don’t know this, but perhaps the despair we experience today is part of what it feels like to shed an old skin as we grow into something newer, something that we will see later is of God’s making.

When I consider how Joseph was treated as a young boy, I feel the despair he must have felt. When I consider how, much later, his experience came together and made sense, then I rejoice with him at the way all things, even the darkest and hardest, work together for good for those who love God and are called according to God’s purpose. And I can claim as my own the words of the hymn by Charles Albert Tindley:

“Trials dark on every hand, and we cannot understand
all the ways that God would lead us to that blessed promised land;
but he guides us with his eye, and we’ll follow till we die,
for we’ll understand it better by and by.” ▪