To Repair and Restore | QUILTS of COMMUNITY

“North Star” by Jesse Krimes, as part of the immersive art exhibit, "Voices of the Heartland" (2019).

Last week, we heard a brother's story of betrayal. Joseph, that quintessential dreamer, was captured and beaten by his older brothers, ripping his beloved coat of many colors to shreds.

Joseph was then thrown into a pit before being sold into slavery and carried far from home to Egypt. There he worked as a slave before being thrown into prison, falsely accused of a crime he did not commit. 

But his story did not end there.

Like any great epic myth, the story of Joseph’s life takes several surprising twists and turns. 

Eventually, his remarkable gift for interpreting dreams brings him before Pharaoh, the king of Egypt.

Pharaoh has been troubled by a strange dream, and Joseph believes it carries a message from God—Egypt will experience seven years of abundance, followed by seven years of devastating famine.

But beyond simply interpreting Pharaoh’s dream, Joseph offers Pharaoh a plan of action. 

During the seven good years, the king should take from his subjects a portion of every harvest to store away, so that when the famine comes, there would be enough grain to eat. 

And! Joseph adds, Pharaoh should appoint someone wise and discerning to oversee it all.

Pharaoh likes the plan... and he likes the one who came up with the plan. 

So Pharaoh chooses Joseph for the job, just as Joseph hoped. 

In a single day, Joseph goes from zero to hero—from a forgotten prisoner languishing in a cell to Pharaoh’s second-in-command, one of the most powerful people in Egypt, entrusted with overseeing the nation’s economy. It is an extraordinary reversal.

But then the story shifts focus when more than twenty years later, the brothers who betrayed Joseph walk back into his life.

The famine has hit his homeland also, and his brothers have travelled all the way to Egypt in search of food. 

Joseph is startled by their sudden appearance and their desperation. 

So while he is still Joseph, governor of Egypt, controller of its vast economy, he is reminded of who he was in his previous life—Joseph, son of Israel, brother to Reuben… and Judah… and little Benjamin… and the others. 

Joseph does not reveal himself at first, but secretly tests them. When he is satisfied that they have indeed changed, he cries out to them—“Come closer to me.” He is finally ready to reveal himself to them. 

He explains that he is their brother, Joseph, “whom you sold into Egypt.” In this one sentence, he acknowledges the wrong done to him, before quickly moving on to assure them of what he wants next. 

"Do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves," he encourages them.  

In my assessment, this is perhaps the most remarkable detail about this entire saga. Joseph wants to resolve the harm that’s been done to him without resorting to blame or shame. 

Joseph wants to repair their relationships. 

He wants reconciliation. 

And forgiving his brothers, for all they have done, is the pathway forward to what he desires most—the restoration of his family. 

To address wrongdoing by focusing on the harm that has been done and what might be required to repair it, without blame or shame, is at the heart of what we call restorative justice.

Restorative justice offers a different way of responding to harm than a criminal legal system focused primarily on identifying crimes and giving punishment. 

It begins by asking different questions: 

Who has been hurt? And what do they need? 

Then, who is responsible for helping repair that harm?

And what would accountability look like?

Of course, in the real world, restorative justice practice usually requires more than what Joseph asks of his brothers here. It does not let people off the hook so easily.  It might involve an accountability process, an apology, restitution, community service, or other concrete acts of repair.

The goal of restorative justice is not to pretend the harm never happened, or simply encourage victims to “get over it.” The goal is to tell the truth about what happened—to recognize the agency of the victim—and then ask what it would take to begin putting back together what was torn apart.

The work of repair begins with telling the truth about what happened. 

And sometimes, art helps us tell truths that are difficult to put into words.

That brings us to the first quilt I want to share with you this morning.

This quilt was inspired by a painful chapter in our nation’s history—the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

A few years ago, the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, the organization dedicated to preserving and teaching the true history of the camp, commissioned a series of quilts reflecting on Japanese interment in Wyoming.

Naoko Yoshimura Ito’s “Letting Go”  (1990), featured in the Fabric of Memory Special Exhibit of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, Cody, WY.

“Letting Go” was created by Naoko Yoshimura Ito of Berkeley, California. As a young girl, Naoko was among the 14 thousand people imprisoned at the Heart Mountain Internment Camp here in Wyoming.

The quilt tells a story from her time at Heart Mountain. While imprisoned there, Naoko caught a small bird and put it in a cage to keep as a pet. Each day, she watched as the bird’s mother overcame her fear of the humans to bring a worm to her baby trapped in the cage.

After about a week, Naoko could no longer stand to keep mother and baby apart, and so she opened the cage and let the bird go.

In this piece, I see Naoko’s remembering her past longing for the freedom that had been taken from her—the desire to fly away, as free as that bird.

But I also see another kind of desire for freedom: the freedom that can come from letting go of pain and resentment. A letting go that is not brought about by forgetting or denying what happened to her during interment, but a letting go that is made possible by telling the truth. 

Which brings me back to Joseph.

Just as it can be difficult to fathom the forgiveness Joseph extends to his brothers, I am struck by the way Joseph tells his own story.

He does not deny what happened to him. His first words were: “I am your brother Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt.”

He tells the truth about the harm. But he refuses to let that harm have the final word about his life.

Looking back over everything he has survived, Joseph can somehow see God at work—not causing his brothers’ cruelty, but bringing life out of what they intended for harm:

“God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God.”

And now Joseph possesses enormous power over the very people who once had power over him.

He could use that power to punish them. He could make them afraid. He could make them suffer as he suffered. Instead, Joseph uses his power to preserve life. 

He tells them, "Go and bring our father! Bring your families! Come to Egypt, and I will give you the best of Egypt!" 

In that sense, Joseph opens the cage to freedom.

He begins the pathway to reconciliation.

He makes the first stitch to repairing what has been torn. 

The second quilt I want to show you comes from a much larger work of art called Voices from the Heartland.

This immersive exhibit was created by Jesse Krimes, a formerly incarcerated artist. 

It was during the year before his trial, which he spent in solitary confinement, that Jesse turned to art as a way to keep hold of the little agency left to him.  

In 2019, Jesse returned to his hometown in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a rural, agricultural community known for its large Amish presence—this time he came to create an installation about mass incarceration in rural America.

Krimes wanted people to recognize that mass incarceration is not only an issue for big cities, but that research also shows that even as necessary reforms are taking hold in big cities, simultaneously rates of incarceration are rising all across rural America. Rates of incarcerating women and people of color are skyrocketing—including in communities like ours.  

Here in Wyoming, we incarcerate people at a rate well above the national average. Our rate of incarcerating women is among the highest in the country. And Black and Indigenous people are disproportionately represented behind bars.

Visitors entered the exhibit through a five-acre corn maze, designed to evoke the maze of the American criminal legal system. At each dead end, they encountered the story of someone whose life had been affected by incarceration. 

Eventually, the one path out of the maze leads visitors into a barn—raised by the community in the traditional way. Inside, the space is filled with 22 gorgeous, multicolor handmade quilts.

The quilts began in a community workshop. The workshops helped people meet one another as human beings, rather than as former inmates, police officers, judges, or probation officers, as they worked together to reimagine what public safety looks like. 

During the workshop. Jesse invited participants to create collages inspired by this question —What does safety and justice look like to you?   

Jesse then took these collages and printed them onto prison bedsheets. Then he gave them to Amish women who hand-quilted each image into one of the 22 quilts featured in the show. 

What stuck most with participants was what we don't see in the completed collages.

When people were asked to imagine safety and justice, their answers were not simply images of prisons or punishment.

They imagined community.

Freedom.

Home.

Human connection.

And yet, especially in rural counties, jails are the single largest investment a county makes. In fact, in Laramie County, we will vote this November on whether to fund a major renovation of our jail.  

But there is a lot of research that shows incarceration does little if anything to reduce violent crime. 

But some things do help: 

Like changes to policing strategies and training.

Like community-based responses. 

Like funding for anti-poverty, mental health, and substance abuse programs. 

The old stories we have told about poverty and crime—so many of them shaped by our country’s history of slavery and colonialism—have taught us to stubbornly hold on to systems that do not make us safer, even when we could imagine better ways to repair harm and heal communities.

In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus had to confront and change his own old story.   

Here we see Jesus confronted by a person pushed to the margins of their society, desperately asking a person with power to imagine something different.

This is Matthew's account of Jesus ecnoutner with the Canaanite woman seeking healing for her daughter.

At first, when she comes to him, Jesus does not answer her.

And the disciples want to send her away.

But then Jesus does respond, but with a rebuff. He tells her that his mission is to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

That is the old and familiar story about who the Messiah has come for. 

But this woman… she refuses to disappear.

“Lord, help me," she begs him.

And even when Jesus calls her something not very nice (a dog), she keeps begging until Jesus listens. And then something remarkable happens.

Jesus changes his response: “Woman, great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.”

He then heals her daughter. 

Joseph's ability to let go of vengeance is a powerful embodiment of mercy and forgiveness. It enables him to do what he most wishes for—to reconcile with his brother. 

But here we see a different story, where the power dynamics are reversed. 

Here, reconciliation requires the person with power to listen.

To hear the person who has been pushed aside.

To take the pain of this marginalized woman seriously.

And then to change.

The Canaanite woman does not simply receive healing from Jesus. Her persistence helps widen the circle of Jesus' ministry. The boundary of who is worthy of his attention and care is pushed outward. Her persistence was also an act of restorative justice. It's a story about healing, but also a story about ending the cycle of exclusion. It's a story about the power of moments when we recognize and respond to our universal humanity. 

That is what Jesse Krimes wanted people to experience in that maze—to encounter the human stories of incarceration.  And then, together, to imagine something different.

In each story I have shared this morning, the work of repair begins when we recognize one another's sacred dignity, human or otherwise.

Joseph looks at the brothers who betrayed him and still sees his family.

Naoko looks at a frightened little bird and sees a creature that longs to be free.

Jesus looks again at a woman his world had taught him to see as an outsider—and sees her faith, her love for her daughter, and her humanity.

And Jesse Krimes asks us to look at people our society has reduced to labels—prisoner, inmate, criminal—and see human beings.

This is where reconciliation begins.

Not in pretending that nothing has been torn. But by telling the truth about the damage done, listening to those who have been wounded, and allowing that truth to change us.

Thanks be to God.

Sermon preached by Rev. Delaney Piper on 8.16.26.