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10:30 am Worship

 

Saturday, June 14, 2025

Exodus 45: 2

“And he wept so loudly that the… household of Pharaoh heard it.”

 

 

When I was in seventh grade, I fell in love with and memorized a poem. Now, more than 60 years later, I can still recite parts of it:

 

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

 

In the fell clutch of circumstance,

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeoning of chance

My head is bloody but unbowed.

 

What caused a 12-year-old to need words written by a man dying of cancer? Why did he need to know the human spirit can survive anything? Why would he memorize William Henley’s message?

If I could, would I erase all the bad days of my life? Would you?

Would I erase the terrible mornings when I breathed in the sour stench of my father’s alcohol-laden snoring in the next bedroom? Would I rather never remember the day a friend saw my father driving late one night with a woman not my mother? Would I cross off the day he left, never to return, with a tax notice posted on our home and no food in the refrigerator?

Or perhaps I would eliminate the night I ran in terror, seeking respite from rockets in a Vietnam bunker. Father Karl Rahner, a German priest during World War II, once described real prayer. Real prayer, he said, was like a night in a rubbled-over bunker, bombs overhead, death standing near. 

Maybe I would surrender a year and a half of hell as I dealt with a daughter caught up in a web of bad friendships, poor decisions, angry crimes. Night after night, I worried. Day after day, I tried to glue her life together like a shattered teapot, knowing I couldn’t fix the cracks and chips. 

Having erased, what would be left?

If I take away my father, I take away the crucible that shaped and molded me and blessed me with many skills. If I take away the bad moments with my daughter, I would lose the most loving ones and would no longer know the joy of seeing her whole, a college graduate, a loving mother, a strong woman. 

You have perhaps heard of Joseph. As a young boy, his brothers sold him into slavery. He lived through that and prevailed, coming to rule the land as a chief functionary of Pharaoh. Pain, anger, and darkness fill this story. Joseph is thrown in a pit. He is sent to prison. He suffers. Then, late in the story, his brothers appear again, not recognizing him, seeking food.

In the story Joseph cries three times. He cries in Genesis 42 when his brothers first appear and seek food. He weeps again in chapter 43 when he meets for the first time his youngest brother, Benjamin. Finally, in chapter 45, he cries a third time, so loudly all of Pharaoh’s household hears.

 These chapters form a sustained meditation on our tears.

Terrible things happen. We do terrible things to each other and before God. Pain and suffering and bad human decisions are so much a part of us that we can’t imagine life without them.  We hate the bad moments. We hurt. But these things become who we are. Joseph’s first tears are painful. He remembers nothing but loss and suffering. His second tears contain more. The pain remains, but now he is overcome with love. He wants to hold his brother. Finally, as he becomes aware that those who harmed him have also suffered, that they too are filled with regret, that they too have changed, his tears are filled with the work of forgiveness. These tears form the backdrop to reconciliation, forgiveness, love, and a bright future.

God reshapes our tears into love, and Joseph recognizes that God has worked ceaselessly in the darkness to bring all into the light.

 

Hymn of the day: Dark Night of the Soul. Online at Rossford UMC - Media.

 

 

Rev. Lawrence Keeler