Sermon preached at Evensong on the Seventh Sunday after Trinity 2025

Genesis 50: 4–end
1 Corinthians 14: 1–19

How often have you felt that something was ‘meant to be’? We hear this all the time. Even in a culture which is in some ways so deeply secularised, the sense that events, meetings, conversations might somehow be providential is alive and well. And yet, we do not often hear Christians speaking in public about the Lord’s providence – that is God’s sovereign will over created affairs. That is a change in the culture of our churches. In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, it was easy to speak of God’s deliverance of Europe from Nazi tyranny. To do so, did not need to instrumentalise the millions of deaths of combatants, civilians, and the genocides which characterised those dark years in the middle of the twentieth century. Of course, God’s will would be for peace. By any metric, the basic fact of waging of a war against this kind of totalitarian tyranny could be considered just, even if particular elements of that conflict (not least its final days in the Pacific theatre) were and continue to be seen by many to have failed such a test. God’s will is for our peace. 

This afternoon we heard in our first lesson the final chapter of the book of Genesis. The patriarch Jacob has already died, and Joseph, who had been sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, was by this time an elder statesman. As a result, his father’s funeral is a state occasion even for the Egyptians. But once Joseph returns, his brothers get nervous. As so often, when power shifts, when the principal figure in a family, tribe or country dies, people become anxious about the future. Joseph’s brothers beg him to forgive them. He responds, ‘even though you intended to do me harm, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.’ To speak in this way is to speak of God’s providence: God’s will and action sovereign over human affairs, even working through the complexities and contradictions of human fallenness.

A traditional theological approach would be to say that it can simultaneously be true that whilst Joseph’s brothers sold him into Egypt, God sent him there. Both agencies – human and divine – can be said to be at work here. In the Christian tradition, Joseph becomes a type – a tupos – a symbolic, prophetic figure for Christ. Betrayed by his brothers, maltreated, yet triumphant. It is through looking back at events that we can begin to identify patterns, even deeper truths, which are not imprisoned by the jealousies and violence so often at work in human action. St Augustine, and St Thomas Aquinas following him, would have no problem declaring that God judged it better for evil to exist and bring good out of it, than for evil not to exist at all. God can bring good out of evil, joy out of suffering. This is quite a fundamental line for Christian theology and pastoral practice.  

But, it is not always simple. Theologies of providence can be horrendously misused and weaponised. They can justify all sorts of bad behaviour and lazy analysis. Perhaps for that reason, the Church is nervous about speaking about providence too loudly. It is too easy to point at particular battles or military campaigns and say that God was on ‘our’ side, and not on the other. The morality of human action is, to put it lightly, often not straightforward. We can be pretty clear that God is not into petty point scoring, and certainly is not to be wrestled onto one side or another as if God is some kind of mascot or lucky charm. The word the bible uses for this kind of behaviour is idolatry: and idolatry is fatal, undermining of the covenant relationship to which God calls people in Christ.  

Yet, God acts in and through human history; never confined by it, or subject to it, the incarnation of the Son of God shows God’s total and absolute commitment to the destiny of the human race and to the fulfilment of the whole of creation. We often refer to the outworking of this truth as salvation history. God acts. But God has acted, once and for all, in Christ. And all our other discernment of God’s will and subsequent work must be measured against that rule. In Jesus we see God’s action made visible, and we recognise God’s will for the world he has made. At a distance, we can sometimes recognise this emerging from the complexities and contradictions of human history, but not in a straight line, and not in a way which allows for others to be written off or thrown away. Over the last decades, proud western liberalism has reluctantly learned that there is no straightforward arc of secular progress. History is not an evolutionary process, with finished results or an arrival point when we can say ‘that’s it!’ We are not moving into a guaranteed utopia where universal rises in education and financial security will lead to a peaceful settled liberal order. So how do we analyse history – even recent history – in a way which takes seriously God’s faithfulness and God’s sovereignty, operating alongside human freewill and human agency in a world which is fallen, less than what it is intended to be?

I said earlier that we can really only speak of God’s providence working through events from a bit of a distance. One image sometimes used is that history is a series of knots which need to be untied, untangled, analysed. From here, perhaps it is possible to identify what has sometimes been called ‘the momentum of the good’ resonating across the past. There will be times when we can identify this momentum as being strong, insistent, and others, where it will be harder to discern. We will need to pay attention to voices and insights other than our own, including weaker voices, quieter activity. Surely, there are no straight lines. History is not sovereign, and nor is human analysis. But we may be able to spot patterns. Martin Luther King may have been right to say that the arc of the moral universe, whilst long and complex, bends towards justice. That is God’s promise, and it is with the tools for such justice – truth-telling and reconciliation - that Christians are called to work.

The early Christians looked into heroic stories from the Hebrew Bible – formative narratives – and saw images for Jesus there. Jesus in the person of Joseph, the person of Moses, the figure of the suffering servant of Isaiah. They understood the past in the light of what they had seen and heard in the world-remaking ministry, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Surely, God acts. But God has acted in Christ, and all our analyses of events, patterns, histories, need to be tested against the fundamental benchmark of justice, judgement, redemption, and reconciliation which we see in the actions and character of Jesus. If we are to share in the revelation of God’s providence – to become intimately associated with what one theologian called ‘God’s ways with the world’ – we will need to take on something of Jesus’s character, learning from his actions and his teaching, accepting the power and truth of his indestructible love. The good news for us, is that this is what was, and is, meant to be.