Sermon – Where is God?

(I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 27, 2026 at Christ Lutheran Church. It was in response to Genesis 39:1-23. You can listen to the audio here.)

Most Sundays, a lot of you park along 13th Street or one of the side streets and walk to church. If you look across the street, you’ll notice the corner. A lot of days there’s a woman standing there. And a lot of days there’s a vehicle parked a little way down the block with a man sitting inside. He’s watching her. He’s watching who she talks to and how long she’s gone.

Plenty of people drive right past that corner every day. Most of them have never really seen it. You can’t notice what you don’t see. But once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.

Hold that corner in your mind this morning. The story we just heard from Genesis and the story on that corner are a lot closer together than we’d like them to be.

Two weeks ago we heard the story of the flood. Last week Pastor Richard Eckert was with you and preached on Genesis 12, where God makes a promise to Abraham and Sarah. After the flood, God changes course. God decides to work through one family, and God promises that through them, all the families of the earth will be blessed.

And what a family God picked. Abraham lies about his wife to save his own skin, and he does it twice. Sarah treats her servant Hagar cruelly and sends her into the desert with a baby. Their grandson Jacob cheats his own brother out of his inheritance. Then Jacob has twelve sons, and he makes no secret that Joseph is his favorite. He gives Joseph a fancy robe, and Joseph struts around in it telling his brothers about his dreams where they all bow down to him. So one day out in the fields, his brothers throw him in a pit and sell him to traders for twenty pieces of silver. Then they go home and lie to their father.

God knew exactly what God was getting into, and God chose them anyway. That’s grace. God never went looking for perfect people. There aren’t any. Humanity is never going to get there.

Here’s what I see all through Scripture. Over and over, people try to climb up to God. In the garden, Adam and Eve eat the fruit because they want to be like God. At Babel, people build a tower so they can reach heaven. We keep trying to rise above being human so we can be like God, and we keep falling flat on our faces.

And over and over, God comes down. God comes down into our mess and into the real world with all its horror. Always. Every covenant God makes is God coming down to meet us where we are. And God shows us how to live in peace and love, how to be fully human. We see that most clearly in Jesus. In Jesus, God came all the way down, to a feeding trough in Bethlehem and a cross outside Jerusalem.

Genesis is held together by long family trees. Name after name, generation after generation. Honestly, it can be boring to read. But those lists work like a drumbeat. Underneath all the fighting and lying, there’s this steady beat of God’s faithfulness. God keeps showing up for this family, one generation after the next. And God keeps picking the unlikely ones. Jacob over Esau. Joseph over all his older brothers. God has a habit of choosing the people the world passes over.

Joseph’s life goes up and down like a roller coaster. Favorite son, then a pit. Slave, then head of a household. Prisoner, then running the prison. And one day he’ll stand second only to Pharaoh, feeding the whole region through a famine. This morning’s reading gives us one window into that long story. It’s a hard window to look through.

We usually hear this as a story about a good young man who resisted temptation. That’s in there. I want us to look again.

Listen to the very first verse. Potiphar “bought him.” Joseph is seventeen years old, and he has been bought and sold. He is property. His body isn’t his own. He doesn’t get to decide where he lives or what work he does. When he does what his owner wants, he gets rewarded. When he doesn’t, he gets punished.

This is a story about human trafficking.

And look at what happens to him in that house. His owner’s wife wants him. She tells him to sleep with her, and he says no. She keeps after him, the Bible says, day after day. This is a woman with all the power in the house pressuring a young man who has none. We don’t usually tell the story that way, but that’s what is happening. Joseph is being sexually harassed by someone who owns him.

When he finally runs from her, she grabs his garment. She holds it up and tells everyone he attacked her. And that’s that. There’s no trial. Nobody asks Joseph what happened. Property doesn’t get a say. That was true in ancient Egypt and in this country before the Civil War. It’s still true for millions of people right now.

Here’s something about Joseph’s story I hadn’t noticed before this week. Every time his life takes a big turn, there’s a piece of clothing involved.

It starts with the robe his father gave him. His brothers rip it off him, dip it in goat’s blood, and bring it home to their dad. Jacob looks at that bloody robe and believes his son is dead. In today’s story, Potiphar’s wife grabs Joseph’s garment and uses it as evidence against him. 

Later, when Pharaoh calls Joseph out of prison, Joseph shaves and changes his clothes, and Pharaoh dresses him in fine linen with a gold chain around his neck. And at the very end of the story, Joseph gives new clothes to the brothers who sold him.

Think about those first two. Both times, somebody takes Joseph’s clothes and tells a lie with them. The bloody robe says, “He’s dead.” The garment in her hand says, “He’s guilty.” Neither one is true. The people with power get to decide what Joseph’s clothes mean.

The woman on the corner knows something about that. People look at what she’s wearing and decide who she is. They decide she chose this. They decide she’s less than them. Very often somebody else picked what she’s wearing. Somebody else picked the corner. The story people tell about her clothes is a lie, same as the lie they told about Joseph.

So where is God in all this?

Here’s the thing about Genesis 39. God never says a word. There’s no burning bush and no angel. God is quiet the whole chapter.

But the storyteller keeps telling us one thing, over and over. “The Lord was with Joseph.” We hear it at the start of the chapter, when Joseph is a slave in Potiphar’s house. We hear it again at the end, when Joseph is sitting in prison. Verse 21 says the Lord “showed him steadfast love.” In Hebrew that’s the word hesed. It’s a stubborn, loyal love that won’t let go.

Now look at the very last verse. “The Lord was with him; and whatever he did, the Lord made it prosper.” Where is Joseph when God makes him prosper? He’s in prison, for a crime he didn’t commit.

I want the TV preachers to hear that verse. You know the ones, with the big stages and the private jets. They’ll tell you that if you have enough faith, God will bless you with money and health and a big house.

That’s not in this Bible. Joseph did the right thing and landed in a cell. And he’s in good company. The apostle Paul was beaten and jailed again and again, and in the end Rome cut off his head. Church tradition tells us Peter was crucified upside down. And Jesus, the one we follow, died on a cross.

Being faithful means you’ll carry a cross. And I want to be clear about where that cross comes from. The world puts it there. The world has never liked people who tell the truth and refuse to go along. The world would rather live inside a shared fantasy, where everybody agrees to pretend things are fine.

There’s a name for this. Researchers call it pluralistic ignorance. That’s a mouthful, so here’s what it means. Deep down, lots of people know something is wrong. But each person figures everybody else is okay with it. So everybody stays quiet and goes along, and the lie keeps going because nobody wants to be the first to speak up.

You probably know a story about this, and it happens to be a story about clothes. It’s Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Two con men come to town and tell the emperor they can weave him a suit so fine that only smart people can see it. Of course there’s no cloth at all. The emperor can’t see a thing, and he’s afraid to admit it. His advisors can’t see a thing either, and they’re afraid too. So the emperor parades down the street wearing nothing at all, and the whole crowd cheers for his beautiful outfit. Nobody wants to look like a fool. Then a little child says what everyone can see: “He isn’t wearing anything!” And once that child says it out loud, the whole town knows it.

In Joseph’s story, people tell lies with clothes. In the emperor’s story, a whole town tells a lie about clothes that were never there. Either way, evil loves a crowd that’s willing to pretend.

There’s a famous saying, and people still argue about who first said it. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Evil can get by with just a few cruel people, as long as enough of the rest of us stay quiet. Evil wants us to keep our heads down, follow the rules, work hard, and mind our own business. And here’s the hard truth. Evil doesn’t care about your work ethic. Evil doesn’t care how good you’ve been.

That’s why real hope matters so much. Real hope is like that child in the crowd. Hope looks straight at what’s happening and says it out loud. Hope deals with the mess instead of covering it up.

Some people think hope means thinking positive and expecting the best. That kind of hope falls apart the first time life gets hard. Christian hope is sturdier. It looks right at the horror and still trusts that God is up to something.

Let me show you what that looks like. Think about the enslaved people in this country, the ones who ran for freedom on the Underground Railroad. Nobody knew better than they did how evil slavery was. They lived it every single day. And they sang. They sang “Go Down, Moses.” They sang about Pharaoh and about Egypt, and everybody knew exactly which Pharaoh they meant. They named what was happening to them, and in the same breath they sang about the God who sets slaves free. That’s hope. Harriet Tubman escaped slavery, and then she went back into Maryland again and again to lead others out. She knew exactly how dangerous it was. She went anyway, trusting that God went with her. That’s hope.

And hope looks like Pastor Molis Augustave.

Some of you have heard his story. Molis is a pastor in York, just down the road. He came here from Haiti in 2016 and asked for asylum, and he was allowed to stay under the protection our country gave Haitians after the earthquake. He married an American citizen. He’s the father of two young children. He pastored a congregation and worked as an organizer helping families. He was doing everything we tell people to do.

Early this month, police stopped him over a broken headlight, and that traffic stop landed him in ICE custody. Last week, at the very last minute, he was pulled off a deportation flight while officials took another look at his case. People prayed. Our governor and both of our senators spoke up for him. Then on Thursday, they put him on a plane to Haiti anyway. Twenty days after they picked him up.

He followed the rules. Evil didn’t care.

But listen to what Molis did while he was locked up in that detention center in Louisiana. He started a Bible study. He sat with a man who had lost all hope and comforted him. Does that sound familiar? In the chapter right after today’s reading, Joseph is in prison looking after the other prisoners. He notices when they look troubled and asks them what’s wrong.

The Lord was with Joseph in that prison. And the Lord was with Molis in that detention center.

Before he was deported, Molis wrote that he finally understood something: for every person whose name gets known, there are so many others whose names we never hear. And he said, “My life is not worth more because I am a pastor.”

His story isn’t over. His lawyers still have an appeal pending. Cruelty has won this round. God will have the last word.

Molis is right about the names we never hear.

Earlier this year my wife and I visited the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. There’s a whole floor there about slavery today. It’s built to look like a dingy old warehouse full of shipping crates. Crates for people. They tell the stories of real people, adults and children, who have been trafficked all over the world, including right here in the United States.

One part of that exhibit is an ordinary street scene. Bus stops, storefronts, telephone poles. It looks like any street in any town. They hand you a flashlight, and when you shine it on the wall, a person’s story appears: where she came from and how she got trapped. Sometimes you hear a survivor tell it in her own voice.

That’s what trafficking is like. It hides in plain sight, on ordinary streets. You have to shine a light on it to see it.

So let me shine a little light. Trafficking today looks like men on farms and construction sites who aren’t allowed to leave. It looks like people who borrowed money to get a job and now owe a debt that keeps growing no matter how hard they work. It looks like a housekeeper whose boss took her passport and won’t let her out of the house. It looks like kids sold by their own parents. And it looks like people forced to sell their bodies, mostly women and girls, and boys and men too. Very often it starts with a promise, a good job or a boyfriend who says he loves you. By the time someone realizes it’s a trap, the door is already locked.

The International Labor Organization estimates that on any given day, about 27.6 million people around the world are in forced labor. More than half of them are men and boys, like Joseph. Trafficking has been found in all fifty states. But every one of those numbers is a person with a name and a life and a story.

Not long ago a woman came into our clinic. I won’t tell you anything that could identify her. She opened up to our staff. She told them she was expected to be with six men a day. Every day. That was her quota. She didn’t see any way out. For so many women like her, there isn’t a way out, or at least it feels like there isn’t.

She has a name. God knows it.

So where’s the Good News?

Here is the Good News of Jesus Christ. It’s good because it tells the truth. We can’t fix this on our own. We can’t save ourselves. And then it makes a promise about what God is doing in Jesus. If what we’re proclaiming doesn’t need Jesus to make it happen, is it really Good News?

Look at the cross. Some people teach that God was so angry at us that the only way to settle God down was to have Jesus killed. I read the cross differently. On the cross I see a God who loves the world so much that in Jesus, God was willing to take the worst we could dish out. Our cruelty and our violence. Our rage and our scapegoating. Jesus took all of it in. And he didn’t hit back.

The world has always believed that the only road to peace runs through violence. Fight fire with fire. Jesus broke that cycle. He answered hate with love. And God raised him from the dead.

You can’t get to Easter without going through Good Friday. You can’t get to resurrection without going through death. And death sucks. God does not leave Jesus in the grave.

One more thing about clothes. At the cross, the soldiers stripped Jesus and threw dice for his clothing. Joseph was stripped too. And the one they stripped is the one who clothes us. Way back in the garden, when Adam and Eve were ashamed, God sewed clothes for them with God’s own hands. Paul says that in baptism we are clothed with Christ. The world tells lies with our clothes. Jesus dresses us in the truth. You belong to God. You are God’s beloved child. No pimp, no owner, no immigration officer, no liar with a garment in her hand gets to take that robe off you.

During my internship I learned that a good sermon comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. When Jesus preached his first sermon in his hometown, he said the Spirit had sent him to bring good news to the poor and to proclaim release to the captives.

So to those who are struggling, the Good News of Jesus Christ says: You will have enough to live on. You will have a place to call home. Your crushing debt will be canceled. You will get the care you need. You will see justice for the abuse you’ve suffered.

And Jesus has Good News for the comfortable too. In Jesus, you who have money will be set free from loving things more than people and creation. You who hold power will be set free from the addiction to control. Corporations will be set free from putting profit over people. In Jesus, all of us will be set free from the anger that turns into cruelty, from scapegoating and racism, from Christian nationalism and the fear of strangers, from the kind of individualism that says I only look out for me. Jesus sets us free from every false identity that cuts us off from each other and from the image of God in us.

That’s freedom. And Jesus is the one who does it.

Jesus is doing it right now, right here, through people. At my last call, we went out to a truck stop and met the folks from She’s Somebody’s Daughter, who go where trafficked women are and bring them care and a way out. Here in Harrisburg, the YWCA right around the corner works with women escaping violence at home. Justice House of Hope works with at-risk young people and with survivors of trafficking. And Peace Promise sits right in our medical clinic waiting room, meeting women where they are and helping them get free.

That work is slow and it’s heartbreaking. It’s also the work of Jesus, setting captives free. When a woman walks out of that life and lies down in a safe bed, that’s resurrection. That’s God keeping God’s promise.

Joseph’s story doesn’t end in that prison. Years later, he stands in front of the brothers who sold him, and he forgives them. He gives them new clothes. And he tells them, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.”

I want to be careful here. Joseph gets to say that. Joseph, after years of suffering, looking back. That’s his to say. It isn’t ours to say to somebody who’s still in the pit. We don’t walk up to the woman on the corner and tell her everything happens for a reason. We don’t tell Molis’s children this is all part of God’s plan. Sometimes God brings good out of terrible things, and the people who suffered discover it later. We don’t get to hand it to them.

What we can say, what we must say, is this. You are not alone. God sees you, even when what’s being done to you is hidden. The Lord was with Joseph in the slave quarters and in the prison. Jesus was with Molis in Louisiana and is with him now in Haiti. Jesus is with the woman on the corner and the woman in our clinic. And Jesus is with you.

I picture God at the end of time, standing with arms stretched out wide, drawing all of us into a loving embrace. The ones who were bought and sold. The ones finally set free from the buying and selling. We see that picture most clearly in Jesus on the cross, his arms stretched wide in the middle of the worst horror people could come up with. God is right there. Hidden, the way God was hidden in Joseph’s prison. Right there all the same.

That’s where God shows up. In the pit. In the prison. On the corner. On the cross.

The Lord was with Joseph. The Lord is with us. Thanks be to God. Amen.