Peace be to you and grace from him who freed us from our sins.

On this tenth anniversary of the end of our former way of life, we gather under the banner, “Blessed are the Peacemakers.”  The appointed lessons from Scripture today are the mechanics, the “how to” by peace be blessed.

The reading from Genesis is the capstone, the culmination of the Joseph cycle in the Torah. If you recall, Joseph’s eleven brothers, the other sons of Jacob had sold him into slavery.  And Joseph ended up on the banks of the Nile.  Years later a famine reduced those brothers to refugees and drove them, their families, their flocks, their servants and even their father south to find food.   Which they found when they happened to find their long lost brother Joseph who amazingly had become Minister of Agriculture in Egypt.

It is insolent arrogance to look no further than what is familiar. We have much to learn from our neighbors.  So we turn to our neighbors, the rabbis who in their accumulated wisdom over the ages say there is only one tzaddik, one righteous person in all Hebrew Scripture.  It is not Adam whom God hand made.  It is not Enoch who walked and talked with God in the cool of the day.  It was not faithful Noah who listened when everyone else laughed.  It is not Abraham, the Father of the Nations.  It is not King David, who was called a man after God’s own heart.  It is not even one of the prophets.  It is Joseph.

Joseph who with narcissistic flair humiliated his brothers, flaunting his dream in which they all fell down and worshipped him. Joseph who shortly after getting settled in Egypt got caught in a compromising situation with his boss’ wife.  (Read it in Genesis 39.  While you are at it, read Genesis 38 too, not out loud to the kids.)  Joseph who never married a good Jewish girl and the one he did marry never kept kosher kitchen.  Joseph who did not circumcise his sons or send them to Hebrew School but taught them hieroglyphics instead.  

Joseph is called tzaddik, righteous because of our text.  He forgave his brothers and did not forget.  Can you grasp that?  Forgive and not forget. Any blame fool can forgive and forget if they bump into a big enough two by four.  It’s called amnesia. 

But Joseph knew a deeper truth.  Anything less than forgiveness is like taking poison and expecting the other person to die.  That’s not the way it works. Real forgiveness means forgiving even when we remember.  Again and again.  Perhaps even if we remember seventy times seven.  Joseph’s words?  “Who made me to be God over you?  You meant it as evil.  God meant it for good.”  Forgiveness is a process. It means putting our hearts on the line. It means going back to the liturgy and recalling our response to the pastor’s versicle, “Lift up your hearts.”  The congregation replies, “We lift them to the Lord.”  Happy hearts.  Broken hearts.  Grateful hearts.  Lonely and longing hearts.  Hearts which have been violated.  Hearts which have forgotten how to forgive. Hearts which have given up the sham of pretending to forget. These are the hearts which have gone as far as they can go and recognize there is only one thing left  -- to rest them in God.

The Head Calligrapher for the Saint John’s Bible insisted on a few things when he took on the job. Donald Jackson said that when depicted in human form the Divine would be faceless. And every depiction of the Lord God would be done in gold leaf.  Twenty four carat gold leaf.   So on the page of Luke Chapter 15, the Parable of the Prodigal Son which really should be called the Parable of the Forgiving father, Donald Jackson, British subject that he is, inscribed the image of the Twin Towers.  In gold leaf.  Twenty four carat gold leaf.  Meaning presence of God.  When asked why? He said, “You won’t find the answers in hate here.  You are going to have to love your way through this one.

What then shall we say to this tenth anniversary of the end of our innocence?  The news is filled with videos and photos of the broken and falling stones of the Twin Towers.  So in the prayer of this day we beseech God to “replace our hearts of stone.”  The current images on television as we speak are of the fountains at the Memorial Ground Zero, encircled with the names of our neighbors whose lives were taken in the destructiveness of 9/11. Again our prayer of the day is to the Lord God who is “the inexhaustible fountain of forgiveness.”

How do we become peacemakers?  Just this: we ask for a heart shaped in the likeness of God’s forgiving goodness and grace.  When the painful pieces of life are right in front of our face and won’t go away, when the forgiveness word is just too tough for us to mention, then let’s simply lift our so very full hearts to the Lord whose name is Forgiveness.  Again.  And again. And again.  And again.  And again.  And again.

And even then, yet again.