Genesis 48:11-20, 50:22-26 "A Coffin in Egypt" Scott Hoezee

Last Sunday evening we talked about how good stories always include some bang of a climax. This evening we need to think about one other thing all good stories need: an ending. Many writers will acknowledge that as difficult as it can be to come up with a good climax, coming up with a satisfying ending can be even more daunting a task. Some years ago I heard author Tom Wolfe give a lecture and mostly he spoke about his best-selling novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. This was a sprawling novel of over 600 pages. Wolfe had done meticulous research, had written a gripping and marvelously embroidered story, and brought the narrative to a great climactic moment. But during the question-and-answer time after Wolfe's lecture, someone in the audience queried the author about what this person thought was that novel's odd ending. Wolfe replied, "Oh yeah, well, to tell you all the truth: I didn't have a clue how to end that thing!"

Endings are difficult. Hollywood directors have been known to film several different versions of a movie's ending so that later on, they would have some options from which to choose. But that means that even while filming, some directors still don't know where it will all end! Twenty-five years ago during the big "Who Shot J.R.?" craze surrounding the TV show Dallas, the director eventually filmed every single actor pulling the trigger partly so that he could later make a choice and partly to prevent anyone on the cast from knowing what the ending would be (and that way they could not even accidentally let the cat out of the bag, either).

Tonight we come to the end of Genesis, and this author must likewise have struggled with how to bring this sprawling narrative in for a landing. We don't always think about the creative craft behind books of the Bible. As Frederick Buechner once said, we don't always think of the Good Book as a good book. But it is. It is a literary masterpiece as well as a sacred narrative whose truths can save. This is not just grist for a theology mill but nicely honed tales that tell God's story well and with the care and thoughtfulness that this most vital of all the world's stories deserves.

So how does one go about concluding a book that began with nothing less than the creation of the entire cosmos? How do you wrap up a story that included the huge narrative of the Flood and that also launched the covenant with Abraham--a covenant that, ultimately, leads right to the very Messiah? Given the grandscale things that have been reported in Genesis, the odds were good that however the author chose to end it all, that conclusion would pale in comparison to so much else in Genesis. Compared to the thunderous opening of "Let there be light!," any ending that could be concocted would seem like a poor little candle, flickering and sputtering in the narrative darkness.

And in one sense, seen from one angle, that is true. Genesis ends in death. Jacob dies and then Joseph dies, too. The very last phrase of the book is "a coffin in Egypt." The book that began with the creation of all life ends in a pine box! More than that, ever since Genesis 12 we've heard over and over again the promise of land. The Promised Land of Canaan has weaved in and out of our narrative sight in the course of the book. Abraham moved there, lived and died there, but eventually his descendants leave. Jacob spends many years far from Canaan on his Uncle Laban's ranch. Jacob returns to Canaan eventually but then Joseph, the next heir apparent, is whisked out of Canaan, too. Now, as the story ends, the whole clan is far from Canaan, living in Egypt. By the time Joseph dies, that seven-year famine that had necessitated Israel's move to Egypt in the first place was surely long over, but for some reason no one had yet made a move back toward home, toward the Promised Land.

There is even a dark hint or two in Joseph's dying words that for some reason it would require nothing less than the aid of God if they were ever going to get back to Canaan. At the time of Joseph's death, these people were not yet prisoners in Egypt--so far as we know, it will be a few hundred years yet before the Israelites become enslaved. But still their situation is such that Joseph cannot simply say, "After I die, make your move back home and take my body with you." Instead he says something more to the effect, "God will rescue you from here some day by and by." It sounds ominous.

So the book that showed us the origins of cosmic life ends in death. The book that showed us the origins of a cosmic covenant ends with that covenant's key promise of land in doubt. As the picture fades to black, the last image we see is a sarcophagus around which the descendants of Israel are standing. In their eyes you can catch glimmers of waitfulness. They are waiting for something. They stand at the coffin of Joseph and they await whatever is next. But what is next? Is there a next? We don't know. There is some suspense. Indeed, there may be more suspense than closure as the curtain rings down on Genesis.

"A coffin in Egypt." So ends Genesis. Or does it? Tonight I'd like to suggest that for those with spiritual eyes to see, there is more going on here than endings and death and uncertainty as to the covenant's future. Because, as Walter Brueggemann notes, the truth is that when Genesis concludes, we are in a real sense still "in the beginning." The word "genesis," means, of course, "origin," the beginning of something. The Hebrew title for this book is perhaps even more fitting: it is berasheet: "in the beginning." The entire book is about the beginning of something. It's not just the genesis of the universe that qualifies this book as a book of beginnings but the genesis of salvation, too.

But whereas the reporting of God's creation of all things was fairly straightforward in chapters 1-2, the genesis of the covenant and the ways by which God began fulfilling that covenant were anything but straightforward. Indeed, as we have seen again and again since January when we began our long trek through this book, God's actions in salvation have been routinely surprising. God grandly announces the founding of a mighty nation that would be populated by a people more numerous than the stars. It sounded ambitious, so where does God begin? With a couple of senior citizens who hadn't been able to conceive children even when they had been young and virile. God then compounds the outrageous scandal of giving this couple a child by making them wait another quarter-century before bringing Isaac onto the scene. It was fairly funny when God first promised it, but in the end, the whole world was laughing at the very idea of Sarah having a baby! But she did have it!

Then, not long after Isaac is born, God orders him killed, and even though that doesn't end up happening, it was a dramatic and most unexpected turn-of-events. Next Jacob and Esau come onto the scene--or technically it was Esau and Jacob, but the fact that to this day no one puts it quite that way reveals much for how that whole episode went! The younger was chosen ahead of the older, and through trickery, deception, and other chicanery the young man Jacob does indeed outwit and out-distance his older brother.

This surprising move of reversing the sacrosanct ancient custom of primogeniture, of favoring the firstborn, continued when Joseph comes onto the scene. He is given dreams of grandeur and greatness, rising in prominence above his ten older brothers and even his father. It all seemed ridiculous, of course, but we readers sensed all along that Joseph's dreams represented God's ideas, and in the end it was God who pulled off the remarkable feat of realizing the dreams' vision.

In Genesis, then, the gospel dictum is on quite vivid display: the first shall be last and the last first. God keeps going to the bottom of the heap, to the last rung on the social ladder of the day and raises up from those lowly spots his key people. It didn't matter if certain folks were losers as far as the culture was concerned, God chose them for glory anyway. In the New Testament book of Hebrews, the author at one point notes that when God made his promise of a son to Abraham and Sarah, they were "as good as dead." But that deadness didn't deter God either from making the promise or from finally fulfilling it.

God is again and again shown to be the God of new beginnings, the God for whom nothing is too difficult, the God of delightful surprises. But in Genesis, perhaps no single character embodies all these truths as well as Jacob. Not only was Jacob the younger child who was chosen by God over his older twin brother, Jacob was also repeatedly the schemer, the crafty cheat who devoted the shank of his productive years to getting ahead by his own wits. He outsmarted Esau, did an end run on his father Isaac by snookering him (and hence also Esau) out of the paternal blessing, and then spent years trying out outflank his equally crafty uncle, Laban. Jacob seemed to believe that the best things in life are there for the taking if only a person has the gumption to do whatever it takes to snag those goodies. In a dream of a stairway to heaven, God had once promised to be with Jacob. For his part, though, Jacob seemed mostly interested in making his own luck in life.

That's what Jacob thought, right up until that moment when the stranger in the darkness provided Jacob with a magnificent defeat on the banks of the River Jabbok. For hours they had wrestled, and for a good bit of that time, Jacob no doubt figured he'd whip this fellow the same way he'd come out on top in all of his life's various wrestling matches: through strength, cunning, tenacity. But then he was defeated so easily by the dark stranger that he knew the whole thing had been rigged from the get-go. He never had a chance. And yet even still he got blessed. Jacob got the best blessing ever from God himself and he got it by grace, not by guts; he got it as a gift from out of the blue, not as something he had managed to snag following weeks of careful planning.

The encounter changed Jacob. As we saw some months ago, when the very next day Jacob hobbles on his bum hip to encounter Esau for the first time in years, Jacob finds in his older twin not the vengeful anger he expected but rather forgiveness. Ruddy, red-bearded, dim-witted old Esau just grinned his gap-toothed smile at Jacob, prompting Jacob to exclaim, "To see your face is to see the face of God!" Jacob knew what he was taking about at last. In Esau's compassionate grace Jacob saw the same magnificent mercy he had just discovered at the Jabbok when the Lord God himself proved to Jacob that his grace is always stronger than human cunning. God is the always Surprising One, yet in that divine ingenuity lies our hope. God will always find a way, even if it's not the way we expect.

It was a hard lesson, but Jacob did learn it. He learned it so well that Jacob's final act, his final coup de grâce, manages to sum up the entire Book of Genesis. Jacob is clearly on his deathbed, now an ancient old man. Among the last things Jacob wants to do is to utter blessings on all his children, while taking care to grant a special beatitude to the children of his own favorite son, Joseph. So Joseph brings his oldest boy, Manasseh, and the younger boy, Ephraim, and has them kneel in front of their grandfather. Joseph is careful to put Manasseh in front of Jacob's right hand so that the older boy could, as was only right and customary, receive the right-handed and more substantial portion of this blessing. But at the last second Jacob crosses his arms. His right hand goes onto Ephraim's head instead!

Joseph is aghast and is convinced this is a terrible mistake made by his father whose eyes were clearly failing him. By way of analogy, imagine that one Sunday morning we celebrated the sacrament of baptism for a baby named John William Peters. How would you all feel if as the water was being drizzled onto the lad, you heard me say, "I baptize Peter John Williams into the name . . ."?! When you are a pastor, you live in mortal fear of using the wrong name at a baptism (or worse, at a graveside committal service at a funeral!).

To Joseph's mind, Jacob was commiting just such a dreadful slip-up. "Dad," Joseph says, interrupting the standard "liturgy" of blessing, "Dad, you've got things backwards. Switch hands!" But Jacob says he knows exactly who is who and also exactly what he's doing. He's doing what God has done all through Genesis: reversing expectations, throwing in a surprise, granting grace not to the one who deserves it the most obviously but to the one you'd least suspect. And that's the closing image of Jacob I like to keep before me: nearly blind, Jacob sees better now than ever before. Arms crossed into an "X" Jacob looks almost like he's blocking the blessing of God, crossing it out, nixing it. But really he's dispensing that blessing the only way such grace ever comes: in the funny shape of God's mysterious ways. Jacob's arms formed an "X" but the blessing came anyway.

One day one of Jacob's great-grandsons, many generations removed, would be a man named Jesus. The authorities would cross him out, too, "X"ing him on a spit of wood. But the blessing comes anyway. The God who wasn't undone by Abraham and Sarah's infertile deadness, the God who wrestled Jacob into a new understanding about the universe, the God who managed to raise Joseph up from the death of what his brothers dealt out to him to turn Joseph into a decanter of life: this God is not about to be done in by anything. This God would keep reversing expectations, raising up the least, last, lost, and lonely of the earth and displaying in them his compassion and mercy. And always, always, looming in the background is that covenant. "I will be a God to you and to your descendants after you. All nations will be blessed through you."

And so the Book of Genesis ends. The people are out of the land of promise. The great patriarchs of the faith are dead and gone. We close with a coffin in Egypt, and from the outside looking in, things don't look too hopeful. But Genesis 50:26 is part of a larger biblical narrative that lets us know this is not the end. Not by a long shot. The road ahead won't be easy, and there will be many more turns and twists along the way. But in and through the surprises still to come will always and in the end be that ultimate surprise of grace. God never caved in to the conventions of human culture, and he never let apparently dead ends prevent him from moving forward. So a coffin in Egypt won't stop the Lord God, either.

In the beginning. That's what Genesis is all about. It's about the beginning of the cosmos, the beginning of salvation, the beginning of humanity's long education in the nature and ways of God. In that sense, Genesis 50 is still as much at the beginning as when Genesis 1 showed us God hovering over the murkiness of the cosmic void. In the end as in the beginning, we are still dependent on the voice of God to bring life.

In fact, we are dependent on the decrees of God's voice right now as we, too, still live in the midst of death. We, too, are not home yet. We're out of the land of promise, in between the already and the not yet, between the kingdom that has dawned in our hearts and the kingdom that has yet to become this universe's all in all. In the beginning God spoke and there was life. In the end God will speak again and make all things new. We await that voice even as we hear whispers of it already now through the Spirit. For in the beginning we find our end; in our Alpha is also our Omega. Thanks be to God! Amen.