09/27/2026 - "Joseph in Prison" (Genesis 39)

You can watch this sermon here.

Last week we talked about the call of Abraham to leave his home and follow God so God could bless his family and through him, all the nations of the earth.

This week we are talking about Abraham’s great-grandson, Joseph, of coat of many colors fame. He’s the favorite son of Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, and unfortunately everyone in the family knows it.

Joseph takes advantage of his position by tattling on his brothers to his father; then on top of that he shares his dreams of all of his brothers bowing to him, and him becoming the leader over all of them.

Which made his ten older brothers incredibly angry, so much so that they sold him into slavery and faked his death so the rest of their family wouldn’t go looking for him.

So that’s how Joseph ended up where he is in our passage today, enslaved in Egypt in the captain of the royal guard’s house.

Scripture: Genesis 39

When Joseph had been taken down to Egypt, Potiphar, Pharaoh’s chief officer, the commander of the royal guard and an Egyptian, purchased him from the Ishmaelites who had brought him down there. The Lord was with Joseph, and he became a successful man and served in his Egyptian master’s household. His master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord made everything he did successful. Potiphar thought highly of Joseph, and Joseph became his assistant; he appointed Joseph head of his household and put everything he had under Joseph’s supervision. From the time he appointed Joseph head of his household and of everything he had, the Lord blessed the Egyptian’s household because of Joseph. The Lord blessed everything he had, both in the household and in the field. So he handed over everything he had to Joseph and didn’t pay attention to anything except the food he ate.

Now Joseph was well-built and handsome.

Some time later, his master’s wife became attracted to Joseph and said, “Sleep with me.”

He refused and said to his master’s wife, “With me here, my master doesn’t pay attention to anything in his household; he’s put everything he has under my supervision. No one is greater than I am in this household, and he hasn’t denied me anything except you, since you are his wife. How could I do this terrible thing and sin against God?” Every single day she tried to convince him, but he wouldn’t agree to sleep with her or even to be with her.

One day when Joseph arrived at the house to do his work, none of the household’s men were there. She grabbed his garment, saying, “Lie down with me.” But he left his garment in her hands and ran outside. When she realized that he had left his garment in her hands and run outside, she summoned the men of her house and said to them, “Look, my husband brought us a Hebrew to ridicule us. He came to me to lie down with me, but I screamed. When he heard me raise my voice and scream, he left his garment with me and ran outside.” She kept his garment with her until Joseph’s master came home, and she told him the same thing: “The Hebrew slave whom you brought to us, to ridicule me, came to me; but when I raised my voice and screamed, he left his garment with me and ran outside.”

When Joseph’s master heard the thing that his wife told him, “This is what your servant did to me,” he was incensed. Joseph’s master took him and threw him in jail, the place where the king’s prisoners were held. While he was in jail, the Lord was with Joseph and remained loyal to him. He caused the jail’s commander to think highly of Joseph. The jail’s commander put all of the prisoners in the jail under Joseph’s supervision, and he was the one who determined everything that happened there. The jail’s commander paid no attention to anything under Joseph’s supervision, because the Lord was with him and made everything he did successful.

~

I love Broadway musicals, and one of the first ones I became obsessed with as a kid was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. We had the 1999 movie starring Donny Osmond as Joseph on VHS, and I would watch it over and over again, multiple times in a day, for days on end. I’m pretty sure at one point I had the entire thing memorized.

Well, the entire thing except for one part, and that was the scene that makes up our passage today. My poor mom would have to watch this movie with me every single time so that when the song about Potiphar’s wife came up, she could skip through it so that I didn’t start asking questions that she didn’t know the age-appropriate answer to.

But this scene is an important connection between the highest point of Joseph’s life - as the favored son - and the lowest point - being thrown into prison. But the connection is not a straight line going down. It’s a series of mountains and valleys heading down into the depths of a jail cell.

Genesis 39 starts out with Joseph getting sold to Potiphar. He does well with every task he’s assigned, and works his way up to running the entire household as Potiphar’s assistant. In fact Potiphar ends up trusting him so much that he just hands everything over in the household to his supervision and doesn’t really keep an eye on him. And Joseph ends up being a really good household manager! Which is kind of surprising, given that the only other thing on his resume is being a spoiled younger brother and a tattletale. And while he isn’t a free man, he could’ve been in way worse situations as a slave.

But then Potiphar’s wife starts getting ideas, and we get the section that my mom would always skip through when I was a little kid.

Make no mistake; Joseph is a victim of sexual harassment and sexual assault here. As a slave he’s got no rights, and Potiphar’s wife holds all of the power. It’ll be her word against his, and no matter how much Potiphar trusted Joseph, his wife’s word would always win out. And it does. That’s how Joseph goes from the supervisor of Potiphar’s household to being held in the Pharaoh’s jail in a matter of hours.

This is the lowest point in Joseph’s life, but he doesn’t stay down for long. Verse 21 says that God “caused the jail’s commander to think highly of Joseph” and he puts Joseph in charge of all the other prisoners. Either he’s a natural born leader, or the warden was taking any chance he got to push work off onto someone else. It’s a repeat of what happened in Potiphar’s house; Joseph came in to the situation and then got elevated to be in charge of it. Well, as much as he can be as first a slave, then as an imprisoned slave. And both times Scripture tells us it’s because God is still with Joseph, and still loyal to him.

Then the natural next question is, why doesn’t God get Joseph out of Egypt then? Or, even prevent Joseph from being sent to Egypt in the first place?

Essentially, if God is good, why do bad things happen?

If you’re hoping for an easy, simple answer to this question, I am very sorry, but there just isn’t one. This is a question that has been wrestled with and debated for thousands of years, since the very founding of Christianity.

And theologians and scholars and pastors and priests and people have come to different conclusions based on their interpretation of Scripture and their experience with God. We all have gone through times of grief and pain and suffering that have put our faith, our values, and our beliefs to the test. Oftentimes on the other side, they don’t look the same as they did before.

For the most part, I’m not going to challenge them today. Your unique experiences have led to your explanation for how God is present - or not present - in your suffering. With the wide variety of experiences in this sanctuary, I’m not going to be able to talk about all of the nuances well. That’s for one-on-one conversations, if you ever want to have one about it.

However, I will challenge one idea, because while it’s the simplest explanation, I believe it can be one of the most damaging spiritually. And that’s the idea that God allows or purposefully causes suffering for our own personal growth, or for the personal growth of others, so we either come back to God or somehow draw closer to God.

When I was in middle school, we had a guest speaker at youth group one night who came to talk to us about having faith through hard times. And the hard times he was talking about was the tragic death of his daughter in a car accident, who was also in middle school when she passed away. His entire point was that his daughter’s death was the catalyst for him returning to church and re-establishing his relationship with God that he’d lost as a young man, and that he thought God had allowed her to die so that he would turn back towards God. I think this was meant to be inspiring to us, that suffering isn’t meaningless, and that God has a purpose for everything that happens in our lives. But that’s not what we took away from it. Instead my friends and I, who again were the same age his daughter was when she died, got really worried that something would happen to us because one of our friends or family members wasn’t a Christian. We were worried that our own lives would become someone else’s return-to-God story.

Let me be clear, this is horrible theology. God did not cause this man’s daughter’s death, or even allowed it to happen, just so this man would start going back to church and praying again.

There is no way God would think so little of his daughter’s life.

And there is no way that God causes cancer, strokes, heart attacks, tragic accidents, losses of jobs, house fires, natural disasters, name any other tragedy for the explicit purpose of our own growth or for God’s personal gain.

God is not that selfish or manipulative or petty.

But God is still there in the midst of the cancer, the stroke, the loss of a loved one, or the hurricane that swept through your life.

And God shares your grief too.

One of my favorite stories in the Bible is the story of two sisters, Mary and Martha, meeting with Jesus on the road as he tried to get back before their brother, Jesus’s friend Lazarus, died. Jesus didn’t make it in time, and the sisters met him to demand answers as to why their brother died when Jesus could’ve saved him.

And this moment is where we get the shortest verse in all of Scripture; John 11:35 - “Jesus wept.”

Because even though Jesus knew the outcome, that he would resurrect Lazarus from the dead, he still grieved his death with Mary and Martha.

He cared about their grief and sorrow, and he cried with them.

Jesus stayed with Mary and Martha in their grief, just as God stayed with Joseph in his suffering. And even though God did not cause Joseph to get sold into slavery or throw into prison, God still worked through Joseph’s circumstances for good.

This is a more nuanced line to walk, but it’s an important one. Because while God does not cause suffering for our sake or God’s sake, God can and does work with it and through it to bring some good into our lives and into the world. Whether that’s a reminder that we’re not alone in the world, learning more about ourselves, or the setting in motion of a series of events that turns your life around for the better.

That being said, that is probably the last thing that anybody wants to hear when they’ve lost a loved one in a tragic accident or have been diagnosed with cancer. We can be tempted to push people who are struggling to find the silver lining to their storm, to help ease our discomfort at their pain by having them reassure us somewhat that they’re still okay. We can push for them to be resurrected into something new before it’s their time.

But when someone is grieving or in pain, that’s not our job. Our job is to sit with them in that grief and pain, and hold it with them. It can be incredibly uncomfortable, and it can involve a lot of uneasy silence, a lot of tears, and a lot of saying the wrong thing before we learn how to say the right ones. But we are not the ones meant to tell them to look for the laughter through their tears. We’re meant to cry with them. To hold them, to comfort them, to listen and nod as they rage and question God and the universe and humanity.

Hopefully one day, they will be able to tell us how they see it all coming together in their life. Hopefully they will be able to tell us the good that they saw God working in their lives during that time, how they saw their resurrection from the grave they were in. But they are the ones who will tell us that story. We cannot be the ones to write it for them.

And while the narrator’s refrain throughout Joseph’s story is that God was with him, Joseph will go on to say the same eventually. After his father passes away, Joseph’s brothers worry that Joseph will turn against them and punish them for the harm they did to him. But in Genesis 50:19, the last chapter of the book, Joseph tells them, “Don’t be afraid. Am I God? You planned something bad for me, but God produced something good from it.”

Friends, this is what our faith dares to proclaim to this day - the belief that even in the depths of grief, of despair, when we’re facing our worst nightmares, God is still with us.

Even as wars rage, political tensions boil over, and governments around the world move away from democracy and towards dictatorship, God is with us.

Even in the midst of cancer and terminal diseases, in rehab centers and nursing homes when things just don’t seem to be getting better no matter what we try, God is with us.

Even in the tempest of typhoons, wildfires, and windstorms that sweep through in the blink of an eye, God is with us.

And even at two in the morning when you sit up in bed with all the anxiety and fear of the world pressing down on your shoulders, God is with you.

God is with us through all of it.

And we believe that just as Jesus was resurrected from the dead, life and goodness can be resurrected from despair, from grief, and from the depths of a prison cell.

We may still have scars from what we have been through, we may be forever changed in ways we wish we weren’t.

The life we find after trauma and loss is not the same as the life we had before it. But that does not mean it is any less beautiful or good because we still hold the marks of what we’ve lived through.

But we’re not alone in that. Because even Jesus’s resurrected body still had scars from his crucifixion.

It’s all right if we do to.