Good morning, Emmanuel! I am with you this weekend and next and so I thought I might do a mini-preaching series on the Genesis readings that come up today and then again next weekend.
Congregations and their preachers have options during the summer months for the Old Testament readings, Track 1 or Track 2. Although you have been on Track 2 here, your very kind priest, Luther, was gracious enough to accommodate my request to switch over to Track 1 and the readings from Genesis for these two Sundays that I’m with you. So let's go...
Jacob settled in the land where his father had lived as an alien, the land of Canaan. This is the story of the family of Jacob.
Jacob is one of the few people in the Bible who gets almost as much attention as his grandfather, Abraham. Abraham may well be the “father of faith.” But he really enters the Biblical stage as an adult. Only Moses and Jesus come to my mind as getting more attention than Jacob does from birth to death. That is fitting, for in the reading immediately before today’s, Jacob wrestles with the angel of God and is given a new name: Israel. He is the archetype of this people God has claimed as “chosen.”
Contrast the amount of time the narrator spends on Jacob with Abraham’s son/Jacob’s father, Isaac. We see Isaac at birth and then climbing Mount Moriah with his father and then near death and then mistakenly giving the blessing to Jacob who tricks him into it, rather than to Esau. That’s about it.
After reconciling with his brother Esau, we are told that Jacob settled down to live in the land where his father had lived as an alien. With all his kids, it is now looking like the promise made by God to his grandfather is secure: the land is given and descendants (while not yet as many as the stars) are quite numerous. It’s a complicated blended family with thirteen kids: twelve sons and one daughter by four different mothers. Joseph, his youngest, is now seventeen and is his favorite – not only because he’s the baby in the family but also because Joseph’s mother is the one Jacob truly loves.
Now I don’t want to be overly anachronistic here. But think about a big family with lots of kids and the youngest one turns seventeen. The empty nest that follows can be both a liberating and a frightening experience. There is a real generational shift as that “baby” begins to grow up. I don’t want to overemphasize that, but I think it’s the kind of detail it can be fun to ponder a bit. Most families I know experience some amount of tension—of conflict, and even of crisis—through such transitional periods. As older siblings start to marry and have kids of their own and then the last of the kids goes off to college or a job, sometimes people end up in therapy, trying to figure it all out and how they ended up where they are, and so forth. And in this family it is quite clear that dad played favorites.
I’m an oldest child, so I know that I am the favorite. Number one! Just don’t tell my three younger siblings…
But seriously, families struggle with these issues, don’t they, and maybe big families struggle even more so. Is there enough love to go around? I love the old story about Erma Bombeck who wrote letters to each of her three kids explaining why each one was her “favorite” and I think that’s something to aspire as a parent or grandparent: you love each one as a favorite. But sometimes it’s more complicated than that, and the conflicts, the sibling rivalry, the betrayal, the anger, the hurt all result from people not feeling loved enough.
In the case of this family, it seems all are agreed that Joseph is Jacob’s favorite son. Remember that amazing technicolor dream coat? Maybe it is because Jacob so loved Rachel and because this boy was given “in his old age.” Maybe it’s because he was the spitting image of his mother. Maybe because the other kids were just brats or boring. Maybe Jacob just had more resources in life as the kids grew up: he could afford expensive tailoring for Joseph that he couldn’t when the other ones were growing up. We can’t know for sure but as in our own families, perception can become reality. The stories we tell about where we have been shape the people we are becoming.
In the midst of it all, though, God is at work. That is the theological point of the entire Joseph narrative. I don’t want to give away too much of next week’s punchline, but Joseph ends up in Egypt for a reason according to the narrative. These brothers succumb to their worst angels by selling Joseph into slavery but God brings good from that. God is ever bringing good from ill, as one of the church’s great hymns puts it. So in the short term, this all looks really bad. But the text as part of the larger narrative wants us to see—as the listening community—that God is underneath it all, working for good.
Joseph can see that after the famine, after he is promoted to become Secretary of Agriculture in Pharaoh’s cabinet, after his brothers and he are reconciled. Hold that thought until next Sunday.
This point still has significance for our lives, especially when God’s ways seem hidden from us, when we feel like we are in the pit, and perhaps even that someone who is supposed to love us has hurt and betrayed us and put us in that pit. Here (as with great-grandpa Abraham) Joseph is called upon to put his trust in God. What is different is that Joseph doesn’t seem to have direct access to God that Abraham had. God tells Abram to “go” and Abram listens. But with Joseph, God speaks to him through his subconscious life, through dreams. The dreams are never direct revelations. They need to be interpreted.
Recall that it was one of these dreams that got Joseph into trouble with his brothers in the first place: he told them a dream that suggested he was the most special one. But it will also be his dreams that get Joseph out of trouble when he lands in an Egyptian jail cell. Isn’t it that way with us as well: our gifts can bring both blessings and challenges along the way.
I suspect that most of us experience God more as Joseph did than as Abraham did: we get hints and guesses, dreams, images, stories. We need to keep walking by faith even when it feels like we’ve been abandoned and we learn to trust that God is with us even when it is not altogether obvious to us or to those around us.
The second insight I want to share about this text is for us to notice and even embrace the fact that this family is, to say the least, far from perfect. That should give us hope. It should help us to see that dysfunction isn’t a disqualification for the people of God: maybe it is even a pre-requisite.
Some of you may know from what Luther has shared that I served in a diocesan ministry for almost a dozen years, as Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of Western Massachusetts, which is all of the parishes west of 495 in this Commonwealth save for Southborough. It put me on the road a lot, but before that I’d served as the rector of St. Francis in Holden for fifteen years. While there I did some adjunct teaching of a required undergraduate course at Assumption College in Worcester. We spent a fair amount of time on Genesis which for most of these young Roman Catholic kids was eye-opening. They’d been taught about the pastel-colored figures in Bible-land but what we explored were these human beings who were kind of mess, like us. The same truth carries over to the New Testament. God doesn’t look for perfect people to call; God uses imperfect people to do the work that God has given us to do.
We’ll come back to it next week but think for a moment of how scary it must have been for Joseph to be in that pit and then sold into slavery. I wonder if at least some of his brothers felt guilty or ashamed of what they’d done. It feels like the end of the story: a terribly abusive one. But stay tuned because there is more to come, not only for this family but for God’s people.
We might also notice that in spite of political rhetoric in American Christianity to the contrary, the Bible isn’t primarily about families, but about God forming a covenant community of wounded people who come from families. Sometimes we talk about the Church as a family. I heard that a lot from vestries and search committees when I served as Canon to the Ordinary. I used to push that metaphor a bit and ask people to unpack that, because it is tempting to romanticize and sentimentalize that notion, forgetting the sibling rivalries and petty jealousies and old wounds are a part of every family. Sometimes one of the wardens in a congregation would say to me, “we’re just like a family here at St. Swithin’s” and I’d say, “oh boy, you’re a real mess, eh?” Sometimes they laughed and sometimes they looked like I’d kicked them in the gut!
Jesus says: whoever does the will of God is my brother, my sister, my family. He says the first loyalty is to love God and the second is to love neighbor. What we see coming out of Genesis is an exploration of what that community is called to be: first Israel and then the Church. Both living branches of God’s holy people, warts and all, from the same Source.
That is the story that emerges from Genesis as I read it: in Exodus we get the Torah which shapes Israel, and in the New Testament Jesus comes not to negate but to fulfill that covenant. In Genesis we get this cast of real characters, including Jacob and Sons – including Joseph, the little brother whose story we will continue to unpack next Sunday. Stay tuned. It doesn’t end with betrayal and slavery because God isn’t finished yet – not with Joseph, or with any of us. Stay tuned...
