Sermon of August 14, 2005
Presented by Rev. Chuck Ericson
Scripture lesson: Genesis 45:1-15

“Moving from Blame... to Action”

In the ACE class that I teach at Hartford Seminary, one of the things I have the students do each year is to do a project, some kind a special project in the area of Christian education in their churches. In preparation for that I always hand out this sheet to them early on that says, “The Six Phases of a Project.” I don’t know where I got this originally but I really like it, so here for you are the six phases of any project: One: Enthusiasm. Two: Disillusionment. Three: Panic. Four: Search for the Guilty. Five: Punishment of the Innocent. And Six: Praise and Honor for the Non-participants.

Have you ever been involved in some kind of project where that’s how it seems to go? I see a few nodding, yes, you get panicked and then you have to find out somebody to blame (“How can I make sure that I don’t get blamed for this, who can I find to blame?”), and then we punish the innocent and praise and honor those who put the least amount of work into the project. That’s probably not the best model – I actually told them not to follow that model – but it does point out what can happen when we get in a bind when we panic about something or get disillusioned. When something’s going wrong, one of the almost instinctual things for many people to do is find something or someone to blame. To find out who we can pin this on so it doesn’t get pinned on us. It’s a powerful force, blame. Often it comes about when feelings are really welling up inside us and we gotta just do something and we say, “I’ve got to blame somebody for that.”

This is the middle of the baseball season, so baseball things still come to mind. I think of one of the great examples of blame is poor Bill Buckner who played for the Red Sox for many years and at one time was what’s considered a Golden Glove first baseman. He was a very, very good fielder and many of you know this story. In the World Series against the Mets, he was playing first base and Mookie Wilson hit a ground ball to Bill Buckner, just right straight at him. Bill Buckner put his glove down and the ball went right under it and into the outfield and what transpired after that, the series of events after that, ended up with the Red Sox losing the game and losing the World Series. And so for many many years people blamed Bill Buckner for the Red Sox losing the World Series. Imagine that: this poor guy – he was a really good fielder – just happens to make the wrong error at the wrong time and gets all that blame. And you know what? What nobody really thought about was to win the World Series you have to win four games. If you lose one there’s still three others that somebody else has to lose. So Bill Buckner didn’t lose it alone, they all had a part in it and it wasn’t to be their year (their year was to be last year!). Anyway, he got blamed and he got blamed so often and so strongly sometimes that he ended up moving out of Boston because even years later people would say, “Oh Bill Buckner, you’re the guy that lost us the World Series.” People still blame him. Blaming can have terrible destructive forces. It did on that poor guy’s life and it does on other people, too.

Well, Joseph in this story today from Genesis 45 shows a great example of how someone can avoid blaming and do something much more positive. So I’d like to take a few minutes to look at this and think about first how…

Resisting the destructive forces of blaming can begin with venting our emotions. As I said before, when we find ourselves on the verge of blaming someone, when we want to make sure we don’t get in trouble and we want to point the finger at somebody else, usually it’s because something is building up inside us – some strong feelings, some worries, some anxieties, some fear – and all of this emotion is welling up and causing us to want to go towards blaming somebody and assigning blame. Or even a better word might be “assaulting” other people with the blame for a problem. Those feelings have to be released and one of the ways they can be released is by blaming somebody else and trying to push it all onto another person or another situation. But there are other ways, too, and in this situation Joseph shows us the perfect thing to do.

You remember I said Joseph had been sold into slavery by his brothers, and even though he now was in a high position and he had lots of power and authority and great respect, things didn’t go well even after he was sold into slavery. There was a time when he was in Egypt when he was wrongly accused of a crime and he was put in prison for quite a while for something he didn’t do wrong. So as he is now standing before his brothers and realizes they are there asking him for food and he has the power to give it to them or not give it to them, imagine the feelings welling up inside him: “These are the eleven brothers of mine that sold me into slavery and caused me to be here in Egypt away from my family all these years and if I wasn’t here I wouldn’t have been in prison all those years.” There would have been a lot of strong feelings welling up in Joseph urging him to want to scream at them: “You’re the guys that did this! You’re the guys that caused me all this trouble” – to blame, blame, blame. But he doesn’t. There’s another way he gets those feelings out. There are other people there besides his brothers, obviously, the Egyptians, and he says, “Clear the room. Everybody out except my brothers.” And they all get out, and he weeps. He weeps not over his anger at the situation but for his sorrow, and maybe also his joy at seeing his brothers back together again. He weeps so powerfully that it can be heard outside and he weeps so powerfully that it can be heard in Pharaoh’s house. He makes the choice to take all that energy and anxiety and fear, whatever is welling up inside of him, and instead of unloading it as blame upon them, he weeps out of sorrow. Imagine what a difficult thing that would be even back then for a man in a position of power to break down and cry in front of other men. But that’s what he chose to do. That’s how he got rid of the emotions, by turning it into something that would not hurt someone else but would just freely let out his feelings. So that’s one way to avoid blame, to take the energy that would be directed towards blame and direct it somewhere else that’s not as harmful, such as weeping or sorrow over the situation that’s taking place.

So that’s the beginning of how we can resist the destructive powers of blame – by redirecting that emotion somewhere else.

But another thing is to put things in their proper perspective. Joseph does that very well. Instead of blaming them here he says, “You know, you didn’t put me here, oh, you might have sold me into slavery, but it wasn’t really you. God wanted me to be here. God put me in this place through your actions so that I would be here to help people during this time of famine and ultimately to help you. I have the power to give you food now. I have the power to keep you alive, sustain you.” He said, “I’m not blaming you, I’m putting things in the right perspective saying that I believe God put me here.” You see when he was in prison a couple of characters from Pharaoh’s court found out that he could interpret dreams and Pharaoh heard about this eventually and Pharaoh said, “I’ve had these dreams about seven fat cows and seven thin cows” and so Joseph interpreted that dream for him and said, “Well the seven fat cows mean that we’re going to have seven years of plenty in the harvest followed by seven years of famine. So the best thing you can do, Pharaoh, is to store up all that food, all the grain and everything you can store up in the first seven years so that when the seven lean years come along you’ll have enough for everyone to eat.” So because of his ability to interpret dreams and because all these succession of events led to him being in front of Pharaoh interpreting his dreams, people had food. So Joseph put this in perspective and said, “Despite all the bad things that happened, despite me being sold into slavery and being in prison, all of that led to the place I am now that means I can keep people alive and I can help you, my brothers. Bring my father here and I will help all of you and keep you alive during the famine.”  He said that God was in the midst of all this. That was his perspective.

In the news this week, at least in the religious news, there was a story of how Millard Fuller, the CEO of Habitat for Humanity that builds houses all over the country, has been ousted by his board from his position as CEO of Habitat for Humanity. So I got thinking about him because when he began Habitat for Humanity he also put things in that same perspective and said that he believes that God brought him to that point through a series of hardships. He’d been, I think, a corporate attorney, he had made millions of dollars, been very successful in business, and yet his personal life was falling apart – his wife had left him, she was filing for divorce. He said in the midst of all that he looked at his life again and he decided the way he was going was not the right way, and so he left his corporate world and took the wealth he had and started Habitat for Humanity. Out of the hardship of the end of his professional career and the hardship of his marriage being on the rocks, at that time he felt that God was at work in his life, leading him to do something to help other people, as Joseph had been led in the same way. In the report about him being ousted as CEO this month it said that they were on the verge of building the 200,000th house. Almost 200,000 houses have been built in rural and urban poor areas around the country, all because he was having a bad time at work and at home. Well, that’s putting it very mildly, but he saw that it wasn’t about those things, it was about God leading him from one place to another.

When someone speaks to me about a tragedy or an upheaval in their life and wants to know why has this happened, one of the things that I often say is, “Don’t ask why. You may never ever have a satisfactory answer to the question of why did this happen. It’s better to ask, ‘What can I do now that this has happened? How can I see God at work, helping me through this time and leading me to another time, a better time?’ ” It’s a simple way of trying to put things into perspective. It’s essentially what Joseph did. It’s what Millard Fuller did and I think it’s the only way to go when we have tragedies and upheavals in our lives. We never, almost never I think, find a satisfactory answer to, “Why did I get in this situation? Why is this tragedy happening, why is this upheaval happening to me?”  The better thing to do is say, “This is how it is. What can I do with this? How can I see God leading me somewhere else?”

Well, the final stage of this for Joseph, after he has sort of moved his emotions over to something more positive and put things in perspective, is to take action. He resists the destructive power of blaming by taking action. He says to his brothers, “Go get Dad, bring him down here and I’ll find a place for you in Goshen, you can set up your home there, you’ll be near to me and where I can get food for you and you can stay here, and you will live.” He takes action and I have to believe from the very end of the story that the action comes because somewhere deep inside of him he reached the core of his being where the love for his family was. I think that’s true. I think when emotions get out of hand, and a lot of that’s because things are happening at the surface and when we try to put it into perspective we go a little bit deeper, but deepest of all way inside, whether it’s in our hearts or souls however you want to say it, somewhere in there is a core of love for the people closest to us. It’s always there, even though we have fights with people we love, even though we have difficulty with people we love, even though we don’t get along sometimes, I have to believe that deep inside there is a core of love, and Joseph found it and so when he took action it ended up with him falling on the neck of his brother Benjamin and kissing him and Benjamin kissing him and then them embracing and weeping and kissing all of his brothers. After all that happened, after all he could have done negatively, destructively towards all those 11 brothers, he ends up on the ground weeping and kissing because he found the core of love inside.

The good news today is that we learned a great lesson here about resistance to blaming. It’s a good lesson for me because it’s something that triggers in me once in a while. When something’s going on and I don’t like it I want to find out what’s wrong, who’s responsible. Something we all should learn, me first of all I think, that going to find who to blame is not the right way to go most of the time. Sure we have to sometimes find out how something happened or who is responsible so that we don’t repeat it, but that’s different from just looking for somebody to unload our anger or fear and everything on by blaming. We can learn that when those feelings start welling up and we know we’re about to want to point the finger and say, “Ah, who’s going to get it?”, catch ourselves and say, “No, let me get those emotions out some other way. Let me cry, let me scream in an empty room, or whatever it might be and get that out of my system and go back, try to put it in perspective and see where God is at work in this, and how I can find, deep within myself the core of love that is there to show me how to move forward, take a step, and be still with those people who are most important to me and I should love.”

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