“The Worst Things and the Last Things”

Genesis 50: 15-21

First Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia

September 16, 2001

John R. Claypool

Frederick Buechner did not grow up in a church-going family. Both of his parents were highly educated and socially prominent New Yorkers, and religion was one of those areas of life about which they had no interest. Thus, he had very little to fall back on when life began to work him over as it works us all over if we live long enough. He was ten when the innocence of his childhood came to a shattering halt one Saturday morning. His father got up before anyone else, carefully closed the garage door, got in the car, turned on the engine and was asphyxiated before anybody realized what was happening.

The elder Buechner had been a popular and out-going man, an honor graduate from Princeton. However, the Great Depression had made it difficult for him to find and keep the kind of job that he needed to provide for his family as he desired. Unfortunately, as disappointments continued to mount, he began to depend excessively on alcohol to avoid pain, and this only served to exacerbate his difficulties. Finally, because he had no spiritual resources on which to rely, the only way out seemed to be that dark exit called suicide. Young Buechner said that, for years afterward, when people would ask him how his father had died, he would always answer, “ He died of heart trouble,” which was at least partially true, “because he had a heart and it was troubled.” His father’s deepest problem was the absence of hope.

Life flowed on for the Buechner family in much the same way as it always had. In due time, young Frederick was sent to the Lawrenceville School and then on to Princeton University, where his father had gone. After a stint in the Army, he was graduated and went back to Lawrenceville as an English teacher and a housemaster. This meant that he joined the faculty alongside many of the same teachers whom he had regarded formerly as giants. He wondered how this experience would unfold, but, later, he said that in the five years during which he taught there, “Fathers became brothers and brothers became friends,” which is a marvelous analogy of how the relationship between generations can shift and grow over time.

As his life moved on, his lack of spiritual resources began to haunt him and, during a period of personal depression, a friend invited him to go to the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in Upper Manhattan. At the time, George Buttrick was the Senior Minister of that parish. Young Buechner was deeply moved by this eloquent and bespectacled Britisher. He was literate and brilliant, to be sure, but what struck Buechner even more was the kind of vitality that flowed through this man. It was as if something from “a world beyond this world” was breaking through and impinging on the deepest reaches of Buechner’s being. He was drawn back Sunday after Sunday to this man and to this place.

One Sunday, around the time of the coronation of the present Queen of England, Buttrick told of how Jesus refused the crown that was offered to him in the wilderness, but He became a king in another sense whenever human beings allowed Him to become their Lord. Buttrick described this experience as one of “confession, tears and great laughter” and, all of a sudden, in Buechner’s own words, “the great China wall came tumbling down and Atlantis rose up from the depths of the sea.” It was one of those incredible moments when God “happened” to someone, as something from “the world beyond the worlds” reached in and touched the deepest place of a human heart.

It was the first glimpse young Buechner ever had of that hope that his father had never discovered. He was so moved by what had occurred that he went to see Dr. Buttrick the following week, and this wise old minister sensed the enormous giftedness of the young man before him, and the tremendous God-hunger that had been at work in his life for years. Buttrick suggested that Buechner spend a year studying at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. At the time, the Rockefeller Foundation was giving scholarships to people like Buechner, who were willing to explore whether they might have a vocation in ministry. In just a matter of weeks. To his absolute astonishment, this one, who had probably not been in a church over twenty times in his whole life, found himself enrolled in a seminary. Needless to say, Buechner’s family was flabbergasted. One of his grandmother’s friends took him to lunch one Sunday and, at a discreet point in the conversation, said “I understand you are thinking about going to the seminary.” When he agreed, she asked: “Is this your own idea, or have you been poorly advised?” One of his Princeton classmates honestly feared for Buechner’s emotional balance and was suspicious that he was joining reactionary forces.

Nevertheless, Buechner reached out toward that Mystery Who had somehow laid hold of him and, with absolutely no baggage of preconceived opinions, under the tutelage of such luminaries as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and James Muilenburg, Frederick Buechner seriously encountered the documents of Holy Scripture for the first time at the age of twenty-seven. He reported later that he was absolutely amazed on two counts. The first was the unbelievable earthiness and honest of Holy Scripture. He had seen quotations extracted from the Bible in his education in the humanities, but had had no idea that the Book was as true to life as he found it to be. There was no attempt to gloss over the brutalities and cruelties that make up the human story. Even the greatest heroes, like Abraham, Moses and David, were depicted as the flawed and failing persons they sometimes were. There was something else even more astonishing to him than all this earthiness, and that was the fact that in this utterly honest account, the worst things were never the last things!

He began to sense a pattern that runs all the way from the most primitive chapters of Genesis right through to the final words of Revelation, and that is that when human beings got to the end of their ropes, lo and behold, they discovered they were not at the end of everything. There was a Mysterious Other in those places of extremity who, like the alchemist of old, was somehow able to take one thing and transmute it into something else. This is the image of hopefulness that Buechner begin to encounter again and again in Holy Scripture and there is no better example of it than the story in Genesis that comes to its climax in our Old Testament reading this morning.

The central figure here was a man named Joseph, who was born into a tragically dysfunctional family. His father, Jacob, had truly loved only one woman in all of his life the cherished Rachel; but for some reason, she could not bear children which, in that day, was considered a terrible blight. According to the custom of that time, other wives were brought in to produce children, and they bore Jacob ten sons. Then, mysteriously, Rachel did conceive a child and gave birth to Joseph. This meant that Joseph was the eleventh of Jacob’s children, but the firstborn of beloved Rachel.

When Rachel died giving birth to a second son, Jacob channeled all of his affection upon little Joseph and treated him differently from all the others. This created an explosive family mix, to say the least. The older brothers despised their father and his prized little pet, Joseph, who became exceedingly spoiled by all this favoritism. Everything was given to him and nothing was asked of him. Jacob even gave him a garment that was most unusual in that day, a coat with sleeves, reserved for those who did not have to do physical work.

One day, when his father insensitively sent Joseph out to check on his brothers who were working in the fields, their frustration exploded and they almost killed him with their bare hands. However, wiser heads prevailed and they settled for selling him to some Midianite slave traders headed for Egypt. They dipped in blood that famous “coat of many colors,” and told their father that a wild beast must have killed his precious son.

Everything about this saga was soaked with genuine evil, but wait, this seemingly worst thing was not the last thing. God, the ingenious alchemist, was very much at work in all of this. When Joseph was sold to a man named Potiphar and for the first time in his life, responsibilities were given him, he began to flower in ways he might never have developed had he stayed with his doting old father. He rose to the tope quickly in Potiphar’s household staff, only to have Lady Potiphar set out to seduce him sexually. When he responded repeatedly the he was not eligible for that kind of relationship, she turned the table son him in fury and accused him of doing the very thing she was doing instead. As a result, Joseph was cast into the depths of the royal prison.

Once again, it seemed that the very worst thing had happened to Joseph, but this alchemist God was still at work seeing to it that it was not the last thing. In prison, Joseph became known as a skillful interpreter of dreams; and when the Pharaoh began to be troubled by disturbing images in the night, someone remembered the young Hebrew prisoner’s gift and Joseph was brought to the Pharaoh’s attention. Joseph discerned that the great prosperity, which Egypt was enjoying, then would need to be carefully husbanded because a period of famine lay ahead. The Pharaoh was so impressed with Joseph’s ability that he elevated him to the number two position of power in all of Egypt and placed him in charge of conserving their prosperity. Thus, when the famine did strike, Egypt became regarded as the breadbasket of the world, which caused Joseph’s family in Palestine to come there to seek food.

Ultimately, because of Joseph’s wisdom, the descendants of Abraham were saved from extinction. Joseph moved his whole family to Egypt, and when Jacob died his brothers feared that Joseph might seek revenge upon them for what they had done to him so long ago. At this point comes the most dramatic statement of our text. After reflecting over the years, Joseph said to his brother, “Be not afraid. You meant what you did for evil, but God used it for good.”

Here is the essence of the hope at the heart of the Christian vision: God has the incredible ingenuity to take bad things and mysteriously bring good out of them. I ask you: Is there any reality more needed just now than access to this kind of hope? September 11^tth of this year will go down in history as a true watershed in our national saga. It was an event that will be used to define before and after for decades to come. I need not belabor the point that we are in an unprecedented era of peril and our two great temptations will be either to give up in despair like Buechner’s father or blow up in rage, like Joseph’s brothers, only to make a bad situation worse.

What we need most of all is an awareness of our partnership with this alchemist God of Holy Scripture. This One did not cause those acts of terrorism by any stretch of the imagination for, in order for us to know God’s kind of joy and not be robots, we had to be giving the gift of freedom. What those depraved terrorists did on that fateful Tuesday was a tragic abuse of what God intended. However, the Holy One is still very much involved in all of this and has the power to bring hope and healing out of this chaos. The possibilities are very real of our seeing more clearly into the true nature of evil and resolving to do differently with our lives. We are already witnessing a remarkable humanizing of life all over the world. We can become more compassionate and Christ like in the wake of this tragedy; and the basis of such a hope is our trust in the one for whom the worst things are never the last things.

Madeline L’Engle has just written a beautiful little novel based on a quote from a fourteenth century mystic that states, “All the evil that human beings have ever conceived or done is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal is to the sea.” This image reflects profoundly the true proportions of reality. It is reminiscent of St. Paul’s words, “Where sin abound, Grace abounds even more.” God’s goodness is finally bigger than all our badness, and Gods power to redeem is greater than our power to sin. There is only one God. Nothing else is as big. I invite you to embrace such a vision this morning and leave this place in a spirit of hopefulness rather than despair.

Winston Churchill obviously held these beliefs. In June of 1965, he was asked to give a commencement address at a university in Great Britain. By this time, the great statesman was badly infirmed. In fact, he was within months of his own death. He had to be helped to the podium that day, and stood there saying nothing for what seemed like an interminable period. But then, that amazing voice that had once called Britain back from the brink, sounded for the last time in public, and what he said was, “Never, never give up! Never give up!” Then he turned and went back to his seat. There was moment of stunned silence, and then everyone rose to his or her feet in admiring applause. They say it is the only commencement address in history to be remembered verbatim by everyone who heard it. What was so powerful about it was that the words were so congruent with the one who said them. Again and again, Churchill’s career had been pronounced dead, but he kept coming back. Why? Because he, too, had caught the gleam that Buechner sensed in the pages of Holy Scripture that the worst things are never the last things.

The account of Churchill’s funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral confirms this fact. He had carefully planned it himself and included in it some of the great hymns of the Church and all of the wonder of our Anglican liturgy. Furthermore, there were two things that he specifically requested at the end that made it unforgettable for every person there. When the benediction had been said from the high altar, silence fell over the packed Cathedral. A bugler high up in the dome of St. Paul’s had been asked to play the familiar sound of “Taps,” a well-known signal marking the end of something. Those haunting notes brought home to everyone there the realization that an era had come to an end, and it was reported that there was hardly a dry eye in the church. However, as Churchill had requested, after the notes of “Taps” had sounded, another bugler on the other side of the dome, began to play “Reveille.” “Its time to get up, it’s time to get up, it’s time to get up in the morning.” That final touch caught everyone by surprise, but revealed where Churchill had gotten the strength across the years to never give up. He did believe that the worst things are never the last things and the final sounds of history will not be “Taps” but “Reveille.”

Pray God, let it be, Amen!