“GOD IS KIND AND CLEVER?”

Lord, uphold me, that I may uplift Thee.

When we were new in this country in the late 1960s, people used to ask us whether we planned to stay. We were very serious people, leading examined lives before the Lord. We tended to reply that we were learning not to plan, because our plans were so often upset. We knew of course in theory that our lives are planned, but not by us; but it had still not been that easy to come to terms with there being no university post in the United Kingdom for my spouse, in his chosen research area, coming home from two years in West Germany to more postgraduate study for me while he got back into Slavonic Studies, and therefore still no starting a family, and in 1966 a move for employment to Canada’s finest lunch-pail steel-town. We felt quite strongly that we had had our time ‘abroad’, and that Canada, like the States (always bracketed together as in “the USAnCanada”) was a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. It was not in our minds to rear two children thousands of miles from where we were born, brought up and educated, to grow to the point where this country became home, to have grandchildren here; or that, as hope of going “home” again faded, desire would also fade, until we were unreservedly thankful for the people and places, the work and the joys, that we have experienced over the decades. For a long time I in particular felt that I was being picked up and put down like a pawn on a board. I felt, frankly, quite used, and not particularly loved, during some of this uprooting. But then as a new convert in the 1950s my whole prayer had been, “Lord, use me”; so what, as He said to me, was I complaining of?

The fact of the matter is that the Lord is infinitely more interested in our growth and fruitfulness than in our comfort and enjoyment. We are very small in the hands of a great God. As the old joke has it, “The difference between you and God is that God doesn't think He is you.” We may not appreciate being chiseled and shaped into beauty and usefulness, but it’s going to happen to us all the same. His ear will always be open to us, but unlike the fantasy God in the witty cartoon on the front of our bulletin, He is very far from needing or accepting our blueprint for any aspect of our lives.

In the spring of 1971 I suffered a personal tragedy, and with the best will in the world was very depressed. Not a pleasure-loving or light-minded person, I had nevertheless thought that the plan for the next few years was fairly clear. Suddenly it all lay in ruins. I found myself saying, “What does it mean when I say that You love me?” I needed good preaching. It came in the form of the shortest sermon I ever heard, delivered by our firstborn, aged about three-and-a-half. We were looking out of the window at the end of a long S. Ontario winter, seeing the trees beginning to bud and bloom. Slipping her soft little hand into mine, she said, “Mummy, God is kind and clever”. I was to live on that sermon for many months.

Some years back Holy Trinity did a parish-wide Lenten study of the Joseph saga. That starts with this morning’s Old Testament reading, and runs, with one chapter, ch. 38, that you may want to skip, to the end of the book. The rationale, as with all our study of Old Testament history, was that he and his extended family (he was one of Abraham’s great-grandsons) are not the physical ancestors of all of us here, but they certainly are our spiritual ancestors as members of the People of God. I commend it to you for careful reading this afternoon and evening. It is among other things a very charming novella. Running rapidly through it now, if you will find Gen. ch. 37 again, let’s see something of what Joseph learned about God, himself and the world, and what we may learn from what he learned. Yes, this was a long time ago, and though Joseph became urbanized in the high culture of ancient Egypt, his extended family did not; but our God, our questions about Him, and human nature, have not changed. Is God “kind and clever”? Was He loving to Joseph, and did He know what He was doing with him?

As a complete reading of chapter 37 shows, Joseph was, and it was his father’s fault, a spoilt baby boy. The best of a bad bunch perhaps, the whole lot of them constituting a really strong argument against polygamy, but spiteful and vain to a degree. How to make friends and influence people was not among his gifts. The idea that his special garment was multicoloured is a very old one but probably wrong. More certainly it was a garment with extremely long sleeves, making it impossible for him to do manual labour, so that he had to be waited on hand and foot. Joseph had grown up conscious of his special position, and conscious of his special gift, his accurate dreams about the future. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness could be assumed. He probably felt so secure in the affection both of his father and his brothers that when he provoked their anger he was really only horsing around. So when they reacted in a murderous way to his teasing, the very first lesson that had to be learned was that attitudes and actions have consequences, sometimes quite disproportionate to the provocation. Even one’s elders, essentially loved and trusted, may turn murderous. And because the love of God, unlike the love of a foolish father, is not a soft thing, we cannot count on being exempt from those disproportionate consequences.

So they sold him into slavery. Good riddance to bad rubbish, and good money in exchange. This was murder, the elimination of the inconvenient person: he would never trouble them again. They stopped short of murdering the person, but they did murder the personhood, or the personality. In the modern world people are a liability, with their demands for food, housing, work, education, medicine. But in the ancient people were wealth, they were machines, they broke and hauled stones, worked the mines and rowed the galleys, they were energy, they were coal, gas, oil and electricity. Wars of conquest were fought for the sake of rich populations. Slaving was a highly lucrative profession, and one roundly condemned by St. Paul in his epistles. Torn violently from home and family, there was no-one to see the slave’s tears. Slaves might hope for good treatment only insofar as this was consistent with protecting one’s investment. Male or female, a slave might expect to be prostituted for profit. There would be no marriage, at best a mating, or breeding, at the will of one’s master. One would be used to the limit, then discarded. A more complete reversal of Joseph’s position, from his superior entitlement to a tool, a piece of property, it would be hard to imagine.

What is not impossible to imagine is the form that Joseph’s prayers may well have taken in the face of this disaster. Perhaps these were his first prayers, and up to now he had just had a nominal faith, as he basked in his taken-for-granted membership in the Covenant. “God of my fathers, why hast thou forsaken me? Do you exist? What does it mean when I say that you love me? Was the promise to my great-grandfather Abraham, about his numerous descendants, an illusion? Certainly I will not be making any contribution to that as a slave. So much for my father’s mystical experience at Peniel. And I thought my dreams would come true. Thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived.” Just like most of us, who never doubt God’s care when things go well. But when disaster strikes, even though we may have brought some of it on ourselves, we pray some real prayers, prayers of complaint.

Three years later, chapter 39, we must assume that Joseph has been growing and changing quite considerably. He has developed other gifts. He has apparently been learning that special gifts are given, not for special status, but for special service. He has taken responsibility for his own plight. He is a sound administrator, and can get a large group of people to work together. His gifts include personal attractiveness. Well, we live in a wicked world; and unfortunately he succeeds in attracting his master’s wife. Will he play ball? It would have been natural for him to have said, “Come on, Joseph, now’s your chance of some real love! God hasn’t acted justly to you, why should you act chastely for Him? Your master hasn’t given you a mate, why not help yourself to his? You owe it to yourself. Everybody’s doing it!” But he didn’t, she reacted in the age-old way, alleging ‘sexual harassment’, and Joseph finished up in worse case, not just a slave, but a slave in prison unable to clear his name. “How could I do such a wicked thing (that is betray my master’s trust) and sin against God?”[ch. 39:9] is what he says. He has grasped that even a slave has his area of freedom, within which he is responsible. When you understand the background of Our Lord’s public teaching, often delivered to people who were desperately poor, and St. Paul’s, many of his converts being wholly-owned slaves, the same point is being made: how to live as a free man before God within severe economic and political limits. Joseph acts honorably towards those who have power over him, he has developed a personal reverence towards God and witnesses to that, and he accepts that to act rightly will not necessarily lead to prospering in the worldly sense. Right attitudes and actions may hurt you. His validation by his master evaporates.

Ch. 39:20-40:23: even in the dungeon Joseph’s gifts are used for everyone’s welfare. He learns to cede centre-stage to others, to interpret, not his own dreams, but other people’s. Again he rises to the top. One man, who owes him, gets out, and Joseph hopes that he will help him in his turn. But the text says poignantly, “The chief cupbearer, however, did not remember Joseph; he forgot him.” So the injustice continues, it appears for about ten years until Joseph is 30.

Chs. 41-47 you should read at a sitting. See if you can do it without tears. They show Joseph rising to the occasion on a national scale. The kindness of God with His infinitely superior intellect is made manifest. He sees the end in the beginning, kills many more birds with one stone than could have been imagined. He loves the others too, even outsiders to the Covenant. That original offensive dream comes true, but in quite different terms. Joseph, far from avenging himself, forgives his brothers from the heart, and sees his father again. If Joseph had ever been angry with his God over the years, he has laid his anger aside. It is not everyone’s privilege to get an explanation from God, but Joseph did: in 45:4 Joseph said to his brothers, “Come close to me.” When they had done so, he said, “I am your brother Joseph, the one you sold into Egypt! ⁵ And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you. ⁶ For two years now there has been famine in the land, and for the next five years there will not be plowing and reaping. ⁷ But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. ^{[a] 8} So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God.” 50:19: “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? ²⁰ You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

How would it have been, if Joseph had not learned somehow to forgive? Never mind his feelings, suppose he had not forgiven in the practical sense, but avenged himself crudely, or failed to rescue his starving family? The corner of the curtain was lifted, and he was permitted to see some of the consequences of his decision; but he never did see that King David would come to be, and after him Mary mother of Jesus of Nazareth and Joseph his adoptive father. Let alone that he would be considered a type of Christ, or that I should be preaching to you about him today. If he had not forgiven, there would have been no redemption, and the promise to Abraham would have been of none effect. Our foolish mistakes, our worst and most wicked deeds, are in the Plan.

Only one human life has ever been perfect. Of the rest of us it is said in Ephesians 2:10 that our good works are foreordained that we should walk in them. Those works are necessarily intertwined with folly, blindness and deliberate sin of every kind. Do you remember aspects of the past that you wish with all your heart you could undo? All this can be as though it had never been. Ask forgiveness, of your God and, if living, those you have hurt, while there is time. He never was snoozing in the passenger-seat when you sinned. Have you suffered what seems like terrible betrayal and pointless injustice, either as a child or as an adult? Decide to let go your anger with God Who apparently permitted it, and with those who inflicted it, living or dead, while there is time. He will give grace so that you can do it. The dead past, that pollutes the present and prevents the future, this can be altered; but only by forgiveness. To be forgiven, and to forgive, this is the heart of the Christian Gospel and of our faith. It was to make both possible that Jesus came. And when we are both forgiven and forgive, the miracles can begin.

There were good reasons why I was depressed in the spring of 1971, and needed that shortest of sermons so badly. I had no conception that I was to be able to say 25 years later, “It is good for me that I was afflicted”, or would learn what it is to live with irrevocable loss, to be a nobody in a new province in a foreign land, to practise sweetness and gentleness to spouse and children out of a sad heart, to seek, often dragging an exhausted body, my knees knocking together for terror, to meet the crying spiritual needs of people who had very much more money than we, to be used in renewal in a large Anglican church, to be apparently instrumental in the salvation of a wicked old man. And to find joy in it. It was not in my mind that I was being freed up for other work, using all that I knew, but not on campus at all. I never guessed that I should be teaching, not in my own person, but by setting free the great teachers to teach, in a congregation which was the most highly educated (in the secular sense) in the Anglican Church of Canada. Or that with my advanced training in Biblical philology, I should be helping so-called ‘ordinary’ people to choose the right modern Bible version. I am still understanding more of the purposes of God, for both character and fruitfulness. But this is my testimony now to the power and goodness of God; and I apologise to any of my friends who have already heard it.

In October of 1964, I started research at Oxford for a doctoral degree. My topic was in Septuagint Studies, and for it I was required to have knowledge of quite a lot of Greek and of Hebrew. I was considered so well qualified for it that the Faculty of Theology elected me into a very prestigious studentship, which was worth by the standards of the day a lot of money. After a year of work, this studentship was renewed for a second year.

In the two years at Oxford before we moved to Canada, I essentially broke the back of my research. After having our first child, I finished writing up my results, and submitted my dissertation in October of 1970. I had all along been advised by two world-famous scholars. One of these was my official supervisor, the other a co-adviser particularly on the side of Greek language. My supervisor was still quite young, and for most of the time that I was doing my research he had not held a chair, but had been an ordinary lecturer. That he was supervising a doctoral candidate was as I now know very unusual. He was not very many years older than me. He was already very well-known. In the summer of 1970 my old Hebrew teacher, who had held the Regius Professorship of Hebrew at Cambridge for some 35 years, died, so that he was no longer there to support me. He had given me an excellent letter of reference when I had applied for my studentship. My supervisor had by now succeeded him in this top job.

Just before Christmas of 1970 I was examined at Oxford. The two appointed examiners were older than my supervisor, the senior one very much older. He at least had been in the position of teaching and examining my supervisor. He did not have a very good reputation, either as a scholar, or as a fair examiner. He belonged to the old-fashioned type of Oxbridge theology don, being a big college man, in Church of England orders, but not particularly attractive as a person. For a number of years he had conducted a personal vendetta against my co-adviser, who was very much better known internationally, and had been born in Canada. Not only had this senior examiner almost certainly taught and examined my supervisor, but he had also aspired to succeed my Hebrew teacher in the post which my supervisor now held. He was misogynist. There was at that time no way that I could make an objection to the university’s choice of examiners.

The viva voce examination which I went through was a shocking experience. It was not that they were beastly to me, but that they were so superficial. There was no particular sign that they had read my work, and every indication that they had not. I was very disappointed that they were so uninterested in it. All the same I had no reason to suppose that I was going to get anything but a positive result out of it. I had heard of those peculiar Oxford examinations, where they played cat-and-mouse with the student, but intended to grant the degree all the same. So puzzled but essentially hopeful, because two very distinguished scholars had a high opinion of the work, I flew home to Ontario and waited for the result.

After five academic years spent in Ontario, my spouse had now resigned, and we were to move to Vancouver that summer. He was moving to the best Slavonic Studies department on the continent, I was to succeed Stanley Martin’s father, and to teach all the Classical Hebrew and the Old Testament Introduction for the Department of Religious Studies, the Vancouver School of Theology, and Regent College. Bill Martin had been my friend and mentor for a long time. There was enough money and enough students for one person only, and he was going to have to give up because of his age. Early in 1971, my examiners delivered their report. I was still travelling hopefully, in spite of a depressing dream about my result. At about that time I became pregnant with our second child. There was a very long mail-strike at the British end. Oxford wrote to me in early February, but I did not hear from them until late March. I had been failed outright. One stage better, or less disastrous, would have been to have been permitted to rewrite for a BLitt. But I was not offered even that.

There was at the time essentially no appeal mechanism. But because I had not lived in N. America very long, I still had no idea how badly this result was to affect me. With Oxford’s recently-received letter in my pocket, I flew West with my spouse, and we bought our house, one block from St. John’s Shaughnessy. Some of you have heard the story of how the Lord spoke to me about our choice of house, saying “This is your house where you are going to bring up your young children”. I saw the Principal of Regent and told him what had happened. He promised to write to one of my examiners, the younger one whom he knew slightly, and enquire into this totally unexpected result.

This was a very hard time for me: I was 33, and had been reading Latin since I was 10, Greek since I was 14, Hebrew since I was 22, Syriac and Aramaic since my late 20s; there was someone not married because his idea of my vocation was seven kids and a country vicarage; and there were getting on for four and a half years between our two children. It was as though I had been equipped, prepared and provided for, just so that I should go through the whole long process and be failed. Between the spring and the summer, when we moved West, I wrote a number of letters, trying to find out what was the real story about my examination. Before the new academic year began, the Principal of Regent College, also my friend of some years’ standing, had written to me saying, “I’m sorry, Priscilla, but at this stage in Regent’s life, all of our people have to have doctorates.” I was feeling very pregnant by now, and devastated both physically and emotionally. I now entered into a number of months when essentially I kept going for the sake of my family, and because I believed that there must be some point in this, though I couldn’t see it. If I had not believed in God, I think that during those months I might well have taken my own life. I came very near to thinking that my life was over. It was not in my mind that I could do better than perhaps survive. I could scarcely bear to read the Bible, and not just the Book of Ezekiel, my prayers seemed to go no higher than the ceiling, and I felt only the absence of God, not His presence. How I got through this time, and reached the point sometime in 1975 where I could say, “You meant it for evil, but the Lord meant it for good”, is the story of the renewal at St. John’s. Essentially I had to learn to say, “Well, what is it that You want me to do then, if I am not a scholar?”

By the mid-’70s I had found out that my examination result had been politically motivated. Essentially the decision had had nothing to do with me or my work: I had simply got caught in the crossfire between senior people. It was to take 20 more years for me to discover that I had actually been my distinguished supervisor’s first doctoral candidate to submit. That an apparently worthless dissertation should have gone forward like that was of course a reflection on him. It had not been in the minds of the examiners to take from me my health, my happiness, a large part of my public reputation and my earning power, still less to risk bringing about the suicide of a young mother, though they had done that. No, they had simply been pursuing their own selfish aims. But knowing this did not bring me any nearer to my degree. There was no recourse, and on this continent I was simply finished as an academic. The whole thing had to be treated as a dead issue. My supervisor and I still had confidence in my work, but my rational confidence was of course mixed with very much doubt. One thing was certain, whether or not those two naughty old men had been right for the wrong reasons: the examination itself had been both shoddy and dishonest. I had been badly injured, and therefore in accordance with the Lord’s word about being despitefully used and persecuted, it was necessary that I should bless these people and pray for them. So with many lapses I set myself to do exactly that. The lapses were chiefly a matter of my having to decide again and again to forgive, for I am not someone who forgives more easily than you do. As the years went by, first the junior examiner, not the ring-leader, went to his reward, then my co-adviser.

As you will understand, I had not been praying for them to change their minds, for even if they had it would not have made the slightest difference.

In the early ’90s, for complicated reasons, appeals of such results became possible. Over a period of 18 months, I ran such an appeal, which was a quasi-judicial process, in which evidence was taken, both written and oral, from all those still living who knew anything about this affair. It was taken from me, from my supervisor, from others of my old teachers, and, as I realised some time later, from my surviving examiner. The hard-fought result of this appeal process, which left me very exhausted, was not that the degree was restored to me, but that I won the right to re-examination. Rather more than 24 years later, therefore, I was properly and professionally examined, and the result was a very positive verdict on my work.

It was hard for me to believe in the reality of this result, until in July of 1996 I actually received my doctorate. Only then did I permit myself to be flamingly angry with Oxford, as the knowledge that my work had been good, and that a terrible injustice had been done a quarter of a century earlier, at last trickled down from my head into my heart. I did not know precisely how old my surviving first examiner was, but I knew that I really had to pray for him now. I sensed, if you like, that this was a spiritually case-hardened individual, who had been a nasty old beast, for whom there had been so little love over his long life that very few people would have been praying for him. We pray, after all, for the Grahams and Stotts of this world. I was going at this time through a physically very painful withdrawal from the sedative to which my doctors had addicted me as an unorthodox therapy for migraine. I was hypersensitive in several ways. I prayed almost hysterically. I felt between September and mid-November, when I took the last tapered dose of my substance, as though I were wrestling for this old man’s soul. I was aware that he would know of the reversal of that old verdict, and that he would find it a humiliation, or at least a challenge. From every point of view, I felt that I had to pray with every ounce of my energy. It is important for you to have a picture of him as a proud-seeming, once red-faced and hectoring man, who had spent a lifetime handling the outsides of holy things. At Oxford he had appeared to be supremely conscious of his position.

By November the 21^st, with no more sedative inside me, my physical and psychological state was very strange. I was suffering from delirium tremens and had scarcely slept for a week even with pharmacological help. That night I fell at last into an exhausted but all-too-brief slumber. I dreamed that I was lecturing on my own subject at Oxford, and after I had finished, from the back of the hall there came up to greet me my surviving first examiner for whom I was praying. He said to me, “Dr Turner, that was very fine. Will you forgive me that old business about your DPhil?” And in my dream, though this was not at all in accordance with his type and generation of English theological don, we hugged each other warmly, and I said, “Of course I forgive you, you silly old thing!” Then I woke up, feeling a deep sense of release and relief, and that I had somehow released him.

A week later, my husband was reading on campus the (London) Times. In it he saw the man’s obituary. He was 89. He had deceased within the 24 hours of my dream.