Epiphany 7C: Genesis 45:3-11, 15; Psalm 37:1-12, 41-42
1 Corinthians 15:35-38,42-50; Luke 6:27-38
The Rev'd Cameron Partridge
February 23, 2025
Good Morning, St. Aidan’s. We have been making our way through the season of Epiphany for seven weeks now, a rather long duration of this season of varying length. Next Sunday this season will conclude with Transfiguration Sunday, followed closely by Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. Today we also rejoice in the baptism of Matthew Ezekiel Hall-Fiame which took place yesterday. We join Matthew’s wider church family in welcoming him and receiving him sacramentally into the household of God, into this organic, ever-changing collective that the Apostle Paul called the Body of Christ. Several weeks ago we heard a portion of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, in which he talked about life among the members of this body – an eye, an ear, a foot, a hand, parts of the whole who need one another. Paul reminded us that the members of that body that the various contexts of our world may declare to be the weakest, the smallest in significance, the least respectable in whatever way, are instead to be uplifted, honored, centered, gathered close, set free. For we are members of a body that experiences the full spectrum of life, dear friends. We cannot fully predict what trials the world may throw our way. But sharing life in this body, we can stand together as we make our way through this world. We can honor our connection to Christ and one another, and look for the deepest truth of our belonging: that we are part of a body that death cannot finally contain. We are a body that rises. That risen reality is the gift of baptism. It means that as we make our way through the world here and now, already, risen life accompanies us, directs and challenges us, strengthens and inspires us, urges us forward.
This morning’s reading from First Corinthians evokes the mystery of that rising process. Paul shares a kind of thought experiment in response to the question of how the dead will be raised, and with what kind of body they will emerge (1 Cor. 15:35). I love the image Paul uses in answer: a seed, like “wheat or of some other grain” (15:37). I find seeds so fascinating. Immediately I find myself pondering how heavy or light they may be, how big or small, how the wind can catch and blow them. Seeds are vast in their variety. But more importantly as Paul uses this image, they sprout new life in and through their death. They have to dry out before their activation by water, if they are placed aright in soil, before new life can emerge from them. As risen life suffuses their growth, they emerge into a form utterly different from their seed shape, as well. What a profound mystery. If I step back and think about the journey of a seed prior to its planting, prior to its growth, I am struck that what we might think of as the risen life of a seed accompanies it all through the process leading up to and through its death. Always and already, resurrection promise is present in them. This ongoing presence, this promise of unfolding life accompanying struggle and strife, is part of the process of resurrection for us.
In light of this promise, we might read our gospel passage as pressing some implications of this resurrection mystery for how we make our way in the world here and now. We know that this life will bring us face to face with hatred, with enemies, with terrible actions that bring us pain – how I wish it were not so. When we experience these things, we are well within our rights to be hurt, to be angry. But as Bishop Marianne Budde referenced several weeks ago in her Washington National Cathedral sermon and subsequent interviews, outrage has become a kind of industrial complex.[1] It can intoxicate us into what Desmond and Mpho Tutu have referred to in The Book of Forgiving as the revenge cycle.[2] Retaliation only generates more of the same. But as members of this collective body in which our actions reverberate so powerfully, in our pain and anger, in our righteous rage, we are called to remember that risen life accompanies us here and now. Already it is present. Already it can begin to sprout in and as we seek to intentionally break the cycle. We may have no idea how to do this—we may find ourselves feeling so overwhelmed in a given moment, that Jesus’ words “love your enemies” (Luke 6:27) may feel impossible, maybe even insulting. Seriously, God? What is that? How could you ask such a thing? And this is where the grace of our bodily belonging comes in. It invites us to unclench our hands, to allow ourselves to rest in mercy, in a love so much wider than we can comprehend. We might pray in the most challenging moments, or perhaps in the wake of our missteps, God, please do in and through me what I am unable to do in my own right.[3] Risen life meets us in such prayer.
I believe strongly that none of these exhortations are meant to suggest we should make ourselves doormats, to allow those who would harm us simply to do so, or to be party to the harming of anyone else. Very much to the contrary. As Paul wrote of the collective body of Christ, “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” (1 Cor 12:26). Our belonging in this body calls us to a stance of solidarity, of love of neighbor, to practice justice and peace in this world, to be about the transformation of its oppressive structures. The promise of resurrection life mysteriously present, accompanying and emerging among us even now, can strengthen us as we face fierce headwinds in that work.
I see such strength at work in our first reading from Genesis, a snippet of the much longer saga of Joseph.[4] Joseph’s brothers, deeply jealous of his favored position in the eyes of their father Israel, had utterly betrayed him as a teen, throwing him into a pit and then selling him to Midianites who took him out of the land of Canaan to Egypt. In Egypt, Joseph had managed to gain favor again and again, because in the midst of horrifying hardship, God was with him and, crucially, Joseph understood this.[5] Through the accurate interpretation of dreams – which he always attributed to God, not to his own talent[6] – Joseph ultimately gained favor and ended up at the right hand of the Pharoah. From a governing position he was able to help Egypt prepare over several years for a famine that Pharaoh’s dreams had foretold. This famine had ultimately brought Joseph’s brothers back to him, in search of food. Now Joseph, keeper of grain, was in a position to exact revenge upon those who had harmed him. But while he tested and toyed with his brothers along the way, in the end he sought to be an agent of repair. God’s presence with him enabled him to name a challenging reality. His brothers had indeed “sold [him] there” (Gen 45:5, also 4). They had deeply harmed him. And at the same time, God had “sent him there” in and through the terrible things that happened to him (Gen 45:5). “You did not send me,” he said, but God did (Gen. 45:8). God’s presence with him in the midst of hardship invited, we might say, that seed of resurrection life to begin to sprout even in the midst of horror. As W. Sibley Towner has written of this saga, “God does not want the brothers to do what they do. God does not order them to do what they do. Yet when they do it, God does not walk away and leave Joseph alone… God is not defeated by what they do. They do it; God uses it.”[7] It is out of his awareness of God’s presence and inspiration in the midst of his terrible circumstances that Joseph is able to have mercy, to allow the grace of God to create new life in the wake and the midst of horror, to make space for that life to grow into new relationship, new possibility. It is a profound story, one that I know I need to sit with in this deeply challenging moment in the life of our country and our wider world.
Seeds of resurrection life are with us in the midst of challenge and death, dear friends. We do not always understand how. Yet as members of this body, belonging to one another, we are invited to share this hope with one another. To share because we are not always able to see the possibilities on our own. We need one another, to stand together in support, solidarity, and compassion, to hold up or tilt the mirror, pointing out possibilities. None of us can see in full—we can perceive only in part. Yet even through a mirror darkly, what a gift, the life, the love made manifest to us in community. What a gift, the witness of this body in all its varied experience. May we strengthen and uphold one another for the work God calls us to do. May we celebrate the gift of new life in the youngest among us, and the wisdom of our elders who have traveled far and have much to share. May we give thanks for the grace of belonging, of God’s resurrection life present with us in all times and places in the mystery of this body.
[1] The sermon in full: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwwaEuDeqM8.An. Elizabeth Dias, “The Bishop Who Pleaded with Trump: ‘Was Anyone Going to Say Anything?’” in The New York Times, January 22, 2025: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/us/trump-bishop-plea.html?searchResultPosition=4. Eliza Griswold, “Why Bishop Mariann Budde Wanted To Speak to Donald Trump.” The New Yorker, January 25, 2025: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/why-bishop-mariann-budde-wanted-to-speak-to-donald-trump.
[2] Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu, The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World (San Francisco, CA: Harper One, 2014), 49.
[3] As Paul writes in Romans 8: 24-26, “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”
[4] This saga appears in Genesis 37 & 39-50.
[5] E.g. Gen 39:2-6, 39:21, 39:23, 40:8, 41:52
[6] Gen 40:8, 41:16
[7] W. Sibley Towner, Genesis, Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 290. Quoted in Miguel de la Torre, Genesis: A Theological Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 346.
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