To begin, I want to tell you a story of a time when I felt God was executing a plan for my life. When I was in high school, college was nowhere on my radar. I know that might be shocking for some parents of children today who talk to their kids about going to college from the time they are in preschool, but for me, it just wasn’t something with which I was particularly concerned.

Now, I knew I’d probably be going to college, I just had no idea where. During the summer, in-between my junior and senior year, I asked my friend where he wanted to go to school. He said, “I’m applying to Rice University.” I was like, “What is Rice University? Sounds like their diet is very narrow.” He said, “Rice University is in Houston, Texas. It’s one of the top academic universities in the country. But don’t worry about it, you’d never get in.” I thought, “Alright, we’ll see.”

So one day I invited my swim coach over to my house and we had a discussion about where I wanted to go to college. I said, “The one place I really want to be is Rice University.” Now you have to realize that when I said this to him, I still had no idea what Rice University was. I had done no research. I didn’t know what the requirements were. I don’t even think I could have found Houston on a map. All I knew was, my friend said I couldn’t get in and I wanted to prove him wrong.

Now my coach was a good guy, but he wasn’t exactly highly connected in the swimming world. He said, “Well Alex, I don’t know many college coaches. In fact, I’ve only met a few in passing, but the one swimming business card I have in my wallet happens to be from the assistant coach of Rice University. She’s a good friend of mine. Let me give her a call and I’ll see what I can do.”

Well, one thing led to another and, eventually, I was accepted at Rice on a swimming scholarship. The night that I got the phone call from the head coach, I was so overjoyed. I honestly couldn’t believe that I got in. Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention, my friend, who said I couldn’t get in, you remember him? Yeah, he got rejected. Now when I got to Rice, I discovered during freshman orientation that the coach who had brought me onto the team had been fired. In fact, I found out she had been fired three days after making me an offer. I was the only recruited freshman male swimmer on the team.

And looking back on it, I felt like God really had a plan for me. I mean, what are the odds. I pick a school out of thin air because my friend thinks I can’t get in. The only person my coach knows in the collegiate world happens to be at Rice and then I get offered the position three days before she was fired. Had she waited three days or been fired sooner, I wouldn’t have received that call and my life would be completely different.

Looking at those circumstances, it was hard for me to believe that God was not working in my life, engineering the variables, opening doors so that I would have the opportunity to be the kind of pastor God wanted me to be. Indeed, I would assume that many of you probably feel the same way about your lives. God has a plan and that plan has been guiding you towards opportunities you never imagined possible for yourself.

Today we are dealing with a story from Genesis that challenges that basic assumption. Does God really have a plan for every person in the world? Has God developed an individual roadmap for every human being on the planet? We read a story about a character named Joseph who is the most loved of his father’s children. This favoritism leads to resentment among his brothers, who decide to sell Joseph into slavery. Joseph is transported to Egypt where he is sold into the house of Potiphar who oversees Pharaoh’s personal security detail.

Once inside Potiphar’s house, Joseph quickly rises to be in charge of managing the household, which means Joseph would have supervised his fellow slaves. But because Joseph is such a good looking fellow, he attracts the attention of Potiphar’s wife who wants to have an affair with him. Day after day she pursues Joseph until, one day, she corners him and tears Joseph’s tunic from his body. Unable to explain how Joseph’s clothes came into her possession, she accuses Joseph of attempting to rape her. When Potiphar is told the story he sends Joseph to prison.

Joseph is taken to a royal prison, which means that he was placed in a relatively nice facility with other political dissidents. While in prison, Joseph becomes friendly with the chief jailor who puts Joseph in charge of all the prisoners because everything Joseph puts his hands on seems to prosper. Eventually, two prisoners from Pharaoh’s court end up in prison with Joseph: Pharaoh’s chief baker and cup bearer. They each have a dream, but neither of them know anyone who can interpret it for them.

Of course, dream interpretation just happens to be Joseph’s area of expertise and he is able to predict the future for the two men – Pharaoh will restore the cup bearer to his position and hang the chief baker. Even though Joseph’s predictions come true, the cup bearer forgets about Joseph until two years later when Pharaoh has a dream that none of his advisors are able interpret. Pharaoh’s cupbearer remembers Joseph from their time together in prison, which results in Pharaoh bringing Joseph out of prison to interpret the dreams. The interpretation is that there will be seven years of plenty and seven years of famine.

Joseph then advises Pharaoh to appoint someone to strategically store up grain during the years of plenty so that the population will be able to survive during the years of famine. Pharaoh appoints Joseph to the position, commonly known as Grand Vizier, which was second in command to Pharaoh. When Joseph rises from slave to savior in one fail swoop, most Christians will say that God had a plan for Joseph: Joseph needed to be enslaved so that he would eventually have the opportunity to save the Egyptians and his own family from starvation.

Joseph suffers so that, in the end, people can be saved. That sounds a lot like Jesus’ story doesn’t it? Jesus suffers so that, in the end, humanity can be saved. Now there’s a lot of different ways these two stories parallel one another, but, in my opinion, the most important way these two stories intersect is with the idea that God is actively moving through human history, trying to implement a plan to save human beings.

In the story of Joseph, the saving is quite literal with the idea that if Joseph had not risen to be second in command of Egypt, countless people would have starved to death, including Joseph’s own family. Joseph saves people with food. In Jesus’ story, the saving is less tangible. If Jesus had not been resurrected from the dead after suffering and dying on the cross, then countless people would have suffered eternal separation from God. Jesus saves people with his blood.

In both instances, the saving occurs because God sets into motion a plan. In Joseph’s story, God causes Joseph to be sold into slavery so that he will eventually have the opportunity to use his gift of interpreting dreams to rise to power. In Jesus’ story, God gives Jesus the ability to perform miracles and preach the gospel, which in turn makes him a target with the authorities, all so he can be crucified and remove the sins of the world. And so one consistent thread in both the Old and New Testaments is that God has a plan for the world; a direction where everyone and everything is going – God wants the world to be saved.

Now I’ll tell you up front, I do agree with this basic idea. I do believe that God’s overarching plan for the universe is redemption for everyone and everything. But unfortunately, our culture, particularly Western culture, which is highly individualistic, has taken that basic message and distorted it into: God has mapped out a plan for every single person’s life. The notion that God has mapped out a plan for every person in the world is a wonderful idea on the surface, but if you begin to dig down, that idea quickly falls apart.

Let’s take the example of Joseph’s story. Now in Joseph’s story, the primary person on whom we focus is Joseph. And that makes sense, right? It’s his story and if he doesn’t succeed, then everyone will suffer. But as a result, we tend not to pay attention to the other people who are merely supporting characters in his rise to power. For instance, the other people sold into slavery alongside Joseph. What happened to them? Well, most of those slaves didn’t end up as a servant in somebody’s home like Joseph. The majority of slaves in Egypt were worked to death in fields or on building projects. Or how about the chief baker who was hanged by Pharaoh? What if you happened to be in his shoes?

You see, not everybody can be a Joseph. Not everybody comes out better on the other side of difficult circumstances. In fact, most people are the supporting characters, not the lead. But in the Western world we love hearing stories of those who triumph in the face of adversity and so we tend to ignore the harsh reality that things don’t work out well for everyone in the end. We try to explain away the examples of children dying from cancer, families murdered in genocide, and the unimaginable hardships faced by people who live in abject poverty with the phrase: we may not understand it, but God has a plan.

No. I’m sorry, but that makes no sense. Such an answer is a way for those who have been fortunate in their lives to makes themselves feel better about the fact that others suffer horribly. If God has a plan for me and I’ve been successful, then it makes me feel better knowing that God has a plan for them too, even if it’s not immediately apparent what that plan is. But I don’t think God has a roadmap for everyone’s life. I don’t think God is planning good things for some and bad things for others. I think good things and bad things happen because of chance and choice and God’s role, in this big mess that we call life, is to bring redemption to all of it. Let me explain to you what I mean by using Joseph’s story.

We tend to read the Bible assuming that the authors of these stories intended for us to focus on the main character, like Joseph. But that’s not true. You have to realize that the authors of the stories in the Bible lived at a time when individualism wasn’t nearly as important as the community. When the ancients would hear the story of Joseph, the payoff was not the individual accomplishments of Joseph, but rather, how his accomplishments impacted the community he was serving.

In other words, we’re putting the emphasis in the wrong place. When Joseph saved everyone by storing up grain, the point of the story wasn’t to emphasize how great Joseph was as an individual, but how God used Joseph to save the Israelites. It was the effects of the individual on the community that mattered far more than that individual’s achievements.

So when the community is more important than the individual, the concern of the person listening to the story is whether the community benefited from or was hurt by that individual’s actions. And when your focus is on the community, this changes the way you think about individual success or tragedy. A good example of this was in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15^th, 1963 when the KKK detonated a bomb at the 16^th Street Baptist Church. Unbeknownst to the KKK, five girls (Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Carolyn McKinstry) were in the building preparing for worship services to be held later that morning. The blast killed all of the girls with the exception of Carolyn McKinstry, who was badly wounded. Four of the girls were 14 years old and one, Denise McNair, was 11.

The tragedy of that moment is hard to comprehend even 60 years after the incident. These young girls, who did nothing to anyone, were killed because they were black. Was that God’s plan for them to be killed in the church? I think not. But their deaths did something that the Klu Klux Klan had not anticipated. The unjust nature of their deaths struck a chord with everyone around the country, even those who lived in the South and harbored racist sentiment. Their deaths galvanized the Civil Rights Movement and they are a big reason why civil rights legislation in congress was successful in 1964.

Here’s the problem we run into: if you focus on the individual, then you quickly realize there is no justice in this world because those girls did not deserve to die and the tragedy of such a loss is incomprehensible. Nothing can make it right because those girls are gone and nothing can bring them back. But if you focus on the community, if you see how the tragedy of their individual lives contributed to the success of the Civil Rights Movement, then redemption becomes a possibility.

God didn’t want them to die in that explosion. God didn’t map out their lives, causing those Klansmen to bomb that church, anticipating how their deaths would contribute to the success of the civil rights movement. No, God didn’t plan for any of that. But when it happened, God wept alongside everyone else and did what only God can do – God brought light to a place of unimaginable darkness. I call this God’s spirit of redemption and it resides within every human heart and it is based in God’s unconditional love. It’s our choice whether or not we want to allow God’s redemptive force to influence our actions.

In this particular case, individuals throughout the United States, whose hearts were in touch with God’s spirit of redemption, were so moved by the deaths of those young girls that they felt compelled to support the Civil Rights Movement so others might not have to suffer the same fate. Was it guaranteed to work? No. Did God know this was going to win the battle no matter what? No. We are free to make our own choices and, if we choose, we don’t have to be moved by tragedies.

The Southern white population could have ignored this tragedy like so many others before it. God’s spirit of redemption could have remained dormant inside their hearts. Thankfully, enough people were moved by this tragedy that it set off a chain reaction. With every person who expressed outrage, it opened the door a little wider to make redemption a possibility. Eventually, enough people embraced God’s spirit of redemption to allow God to bring some justice to the wrong imposed upon those girls.

This is God’s plan for your life. God wants you to use the spirit of redemption inside of your heart to bring redemption to the world. But God can’t do it for you. God gave you a choice and that’s my prayer for you today that you would choose to use that spirit of redemption inside of your heart to bring justice to unjust situations, to serve the poor and the oppressed and to shine light into the dark corners of our world. That’s the plan and it takes all of us working together as a community to bring make that plan a reality. Amen.