Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A (8-16-26)

Last week, we left Joseph in a pit.

He was seventeen years old—his father's favorite son—and apparently possessed of very little awareness of how irritating that might be to his brothers. He had dreams in which they bowed down to him; and, rather than keeping those dreams to himself, he told them. Then he told them again. Eventually his brothers had enough. They threw him into a pit and sold him to some traders headed for Egypt.

And that was where we left him. We had just met Joseph, watched his life fall apart, and then said, "Well, that's enough for now. See you next week."

Of course, Joseph's story continued. And quite a story it is. He was carried to Egypt, enslaved, imprisoned, and eventually became one of the most powerful men in the country. Then famine came, and Joseph's brothers came looking for food.

They did not recognize him. Joseph recognized them immediately.

And suddenly, the story gets very interesting. Because Joseph now has something he didn't have when we left him in the pit: power. His brothers are standing in front of him because they need something from him, and they have no idea that the man who can decide their fate is the brother they once sold.

Joseph could make them pay. Instead, he sends everyone else out of the room and begins to weep. "I am Joseph," he tells his brothers. The brother they sold into slavery is now standing in front of them with the power to decide what happens to them. Joseph could punish them, humiliate them, or simply let them experience the fear and helplessness he once knew.

Instead, he says, "Come closer."

A few years ago, I spent some time in South Africa, and I visited Robben Island. I remember standing inside Nelson Mandela's cell, that small room where he spent eighteen years imprisoned by the apartheid government. Standing there, it was hard not to marvel at the absurdity of it: a tiny cell built to make one man powerless, and yet that man would eventually walk out and lead the country that had put him there.

The people who once held the power eventually lost it. Mandela gained it. And standing there, I found myself thinking about the question that comes after years of being powerless:

What will you do when you finally have the power to hurt back? That is Joseph's question.

And it's a more convicting question than simply asking whether we can forgive people who have hurt us. Because Joseph has options. He could make his brothers understand exactly what it feels like to be at someone else's mercy. Instead, he weeps and calls them closer. But notice what Joseph doesn't do. He doesn't pretend the pit incident never happened. He doesn't tell his brothers that what they did was somehow good because it eventually brought him to Egypt. The betrayal is real and the suffering is real.

What has changed is not the past. What has changed is what Joseph believes the past is allowed to determine. What Joseph does is refuse to let revenge become the organizing principle of his life.

But Joseph's story raises another question, too: what if you never get that power back? Not everyone gets to emerge from the pit and become powerful. Some seasons of life are marked by increasing dependence rather than increasing control. We may need more help than we once did. We may have fewer choices. We may have to surrender pieces of independence that we never intended to surrender.

And I don't think the gospel says, "Find a way to become powerful again." Because that is not the story Jesus tells.

Look at the Canaanite woman in Matthew. She comes to Jesus because her daughter is suffering, and she has very little power in the situation. The disciples want her gone. Jesus speaks first about his mission to Israel. But she keeps asking. She cannot compel Jesus to help her. All she can do is trust that there is mercy in him. And eventually Jesus says, "Woman, great is your faith."

The story grows bigger. God's mercy keeps crossing the boundaries human beings draw: between insiders and outsiders, deserving and undeserving, people who belong and people who don't.

And then look at Jesus himself. The moment when Christians believe we see most clearly who God is, Jesus is not sitting on a throne with everyone else at his mercy. He is hanging on a cross, stripped of almost every earthly form of power, and still he says, "Father, forgive them."

Joseph has power and chooses mercy. Jesus gives up power and becomes mercy.

And that matters because there may be seasons of our lives when we are Joseph—when we have choices and influence and the ability to decide what happens next. There may be seasons when we are the Canaanite woman, when all we can do is keep asking.

The good news is that God's mercy does not depend on which season we're in. When we have power, Christ's mercy teaches us how to use it. When we don't have power, Christ's mercy reminds us that we are still held by it.

Joseph cannot rewrite his past. Neither can we. We don't get to choose every betrayal, every loss, every disappointment, or every wound that becomes part of our story. But none of those things has the final word.

Because the final word belongs to Jesus. And Jesus' word is mercy.

Not because the wounds weren't real. Not because the past didn't matter. But because the love of God is stronger than what we have done to one another. And perhaps that is what we are being asked to learn from Joseph: not how to become powerful enough to forgive, but how to recognize the mercy of God wherever we find ourselves—and, when we have the chance, to extend that mercy to someone else.

Amen.