Two summers ago I was on sabbatical leave in one of my favorite cities in the world–Florence, Italy. Every few days I would stop by an Internet café for some Web time and espresso. Had to check on you people to see if the checks were still coming in. More than once I sat at a terminal near two American girls who were also checking up on what they were missing back home–namely, the latest developments in the ongoing saga of The Bold and the Beautiful. Imagine what their lives would have been like without the Internet. They wouldn’t have been able to keep up with Ridge and Taylor and Brooke, and who’s pregnant with whose baby. All summer long we’ve been following the soap opera that is the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We come now to the season finale from Genesis before we begin a new season next week with stories from Exodus. Some of you have been traveling this summer and probably missed some–though I’m sure you’ve logged on to the Wilshire website to listen to my sermons while you were gone. Maybe a brief recap of previous episodes is in order. We’ve been tracking this family for 33 chapters and about two months, but it’s really the God of this family we’ve been tracking. From Genesis 12 on, we have seen the way God keeps promises with this family, even when peril lurks at every turn. The characters drift in and out of power from one chapter to the next, proving that Frank was right: That’s Life … you’re riding high in April, shot down in May … [sing] I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king; I’ve been up and down and over and out, and I know one thing, each time I find myself flat on my face, I just pick myself up and get back in the race … that’s life ….

The whole thing started with Abram heading out from his home country to a land he believed God had called him to. He negotiated his way among strangers and found a homeland to settle into. We’ve seen children born to old people way past their prime. This is a family that put the fun in dysfunctional. They were at times so bizarre they make the Osbournes–Ozzie and Sharon–look like Ozzie and Harriett. No matter how squirrelly the characters of this family were, though, God kept throwing them acorns for the winter. We come close now to the close of Genesis and to the closing chapters in the Jacob cycle. From last week you recall that Joseph was the eleventh son of Jacob but the most loved. Jacob had twelve sons and one daughter, proving he was in fact Father Israel. When Joseph was just seventeen and should have been packing for college, his brothers got so jealous for their father’s love, and of Joseph’s love of being specially loved, they sold him into slavery in Egypt, told their father he was dead, and thought they were finally done with him. It didn’t work. Instead of Jacob spreading out his remaining love on the other boys, he went back into the tent of his favorite wife, Rachel, and made himself another boy to love more than all of them. Benjamin became the apple of Jacob’s eye and comforted him in his grief over the loss of Joseph. Undaunted, our search-and-rescue God saw to it that Joseph got an education anyway. He turned up working for a big shot in Egypt named Potiphar. God prospered him at every turn. Before long he was running the household. Potiphar trusted Joseph so much he took to playing so much golf that his wife started looking at Joseph as the head of the household. Before long she had fallen head over heels, but Joseph would be the one bruised by her fall. He didn’t think it wise to bed down with his master’s wife. She didn’t take to being spurned by a servant, and in a classic he said/she said story, Joseph got thrown in the pit of a jail. It’s not the first time Joseph had been thrown into a pit. His brothers had done just that just before they sold him off to Egypt. But just as God had raised him up before, Joseph was elevated by his dream interpretations from prison. Pharaoh made him vice-pharaoh over all Egypt, their constitution apparently permitting a resident alien such an office. Joseph was on top again, this time running the Department of Agriculture, storing away grain in big silos during years of plenty, preparing for the lean years he predicted would follow. Sure enough, famine hit the whole known world as Joseph forecast. And this brought ten of Jacob’s boys on a scavenger hunt for food right into the presence of the brother they had wronged long ago. It’s a storyline you could only find in the Bible or on daytime TV. Now Joseph had a decision to make: revenge or reconciliation? This is the decision that often faces us when we find ourselves in a position of power. Few of us go through life without being powerless at some point. We know the feeling of being wronged and being without, of being abused or neglected, of being spurned or rejected. But because God has a way of leveling things, we most of us sooner or later also find ourselves with some power. And the question is whether we will seek revenge or reconciliation. The matter comes down to whether power goes to your head or your heart. When power goes to your head, you think only about yourself and your own well-being. You use your power to advance your own cause, to settle scores, to prove that you belong on top, and to punish those who kept you down. The former president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, is sitting in an international jail today in The Hague. He is accused of crimes against humanity for his genocidal policies of revenge on Albanians in Kosovo. Milosevic had teethed on Serbian bitterness that had seethed in his people toward his Croat and Albanian neighbors, perceiving a history of powerlessness unjustly deserved and in need of correcting. The choice, he thought, came down to preserving life for him and his by denying it, them and theirs. He had forgotten what it was like to live under cruel rule. Or maybe he hadn’t; maybe he remembered that all too well when he should have forgotten it.

Chan Gailey didn’t make it as the coach of the Dallas Cowboys, but he makes it as a human being. He is now the head coach of the Georgia Tech Yellowjackets. There was a nice story about him in the paper last week. Seems Gailey learned from his powerlessness in Dallas, working under Jerry Jones. Gailey is an offensive genius, and Jones wanted to save money by having Gailey be offensive coordinator and head coach at the same time. Jones was himself the real head coach, don’t you know?! Gailey felt that Jones was always looking over his shoulder, questioning his judgment, neutering him of his authority. My words, not his. So when Gailey got to Georgia Tech, everyone expected him to fire the offensive coordinator, or at least to install his own system. He has not and will not. The man in that job, Bill O’Brien, was surprised. He knows how these things usually work. But Gailey didn’t let power go to his head. Power went to his heart as he remembered what it felt like to be in that position. Besides, O’Brien’s offense racked up 31 points per game last year. But the important thing to Gailey is what is right. I don’t think, he said, that when I get to the pearly gates, my win-loss record will count for much. It will be whether I made a difference in lives, whether what I did mattered. It already has, because he let power go to his heart.

You always know what I am reading by coming to church on Sundays. One last time on the Civil War. When Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Grant had a decision to make: would revenge or reconciliation be the order of the day? Grant had proved his power on the battlefield; now he would prove his heart. One critical event had led to the need to give up arms by Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. A clerical mistake had sent a supply train of weapons and ammunition to Lee’s troops instead of flour and bacon and eggs. The men were starving to death and could not go on. Grant ordered an immediate generous supply of rations for the Confederate soldiers. And when they met in formal ceremony to surrender, historian Jay Winik writes, Men were not hanged, they were saluted; they were not jailed, they were honored; they were not humiliated or beaten; they were embraced. Some of this was by design; much of it occurred spontaneously. All of it mattered. [April 1865: The Month That Saved America (Perennial, 2001): 196.]

When Joseph’s brothers appeared before him, he was back on top, seated in power. They had sought his blood, but Joseph felt only the blood of his lost family coursing through his veins. He wanted blood, too, but the blood of brotherhood not vengeance. That’s why he says, I am your brother, Joseph. He doesn’t cling to his Egyptian title of power; he claims his bonds of family love. My friend Kenny Wood says that WE is the most important word in any language. Joseph knew it was not about ME but WE. Do we? Being a good steward of power requires that you know how it feels to be on the other side of the equation. Most of us have been on the other side at some time in our lives and we can draw upon that, but the truth is, some of us have had very little experience with powerlessness that has been thrust upon us. We have to choose to know it by our relationship with those who do. This is one reason why we take mission trips and work with the poor and powerless. It intentionally nurtures in us sympathy of soul. It gives us heart and gives others power. Pastor friend Paul Basden is the son of the late Harold Basden, who the pastor to some of you years ago at Gaston Avenue Baptist Church. His father-in-law, Bill O’Brien, was our former minister of music. Anyway, he was telling me the other day about a college-bound young man from a very wealthy family who was in his former church in Birmingham. His father has always made him work in the summers to pay for his own car and gas and insurance. Dad has gotten his kids involved with Habitat for Humanity and other mission ventures, because he knows that they will inherit lots of money someday, and he wants them to do good with it for others instead of just for themselves. He wants them to let the power of their money go to their hearts, not their heads. Joseph remembered his own powerlessness and would not do such a thing in return to his brothers. But he also believed that God had been at work–even through terrible abusive events that did him such harm–in order to preserve life for the family. Joseph chose to look at how God might be making a future for them all in spite of a past so scarred. He sought a divine perspective on his pain, and it led him to a human commitment to love. Joseph’s choice is a foreshadowing of God’s choice in giving himself up for us in Jesus in order to preserve our lives rather than punish us for our sins. When we do the same, when we reflect not only Joseph but God. It all comes down to this: What do you really want in your relationships –revenge or reconciliation? What will mark your character and rule your actions, the love of power or the power of love? Pray it be the latter. It’s much more becoming of you.