Joseph and His Brothers: Part 2

I am, again, at Emmanuel Church in Manchester-by-the Sea. This is the second sermon in a two-part series; the first of which can be found here. Today's reading can be found here.

If you were here last Sunday, you might recall that I mentioned that there are two different Old Testament tracks available to us during these summer months. Here at Emmanuel you’ve been on Track 2 while Track 1 has been rolling along with Genesis since Trinity Sunday. Luther was gracious to let us jump over during my two weeks which means I preached part one of a preaching series and today, on my last Sunday with you, we will tackle part two.

 

If you were not able to be here last Sunday, here is the executive summary of that sermon: Jacob and Sons were a hot mess. 

 

The sordid saga of Joseph and his brothers began back in the 37^th chapter of Genesis. There we saw Joseph as a seventeen-year old spoiled brat whose most favorite thing in the world was to report back to daddy whenever his shepherd brothers messed up! So Joseph’s brothers are not very fond of him. In fact the Bible uses a word that most of us who are parents forbid our kids to use. It says his brothers “hated” him. In fact, that they hated him enough to want to kill him. This is sibling rivalry on steroids. In the end, they settle for throwing him into a pit and then selling him off as a slave to some foreign traders. This is bad stuff.

 

And that is where we left Joseph last weekend: sold to those Midianite traders for twenty pieces of silver. (Genesis 37:28). The brothers return home and tell their father that a wild animal has killed their brother. As evidence of Joseph’s death, in a world before DNA testing, they present Jacob with that “amazing technicolor Dreamcoat” smeared in animal blood. Jacob is a mess, as any parent who loses a child naturally would be. Except that in this case, it is all an elaborate and horrible lie. Joseph is not really dead.

 

What happened between last week and this week, in the eight chapters that the lectionary skips over? The narrator takes us to Egypt, where Joseph has been sold to a man named Potiphar, a captain in Pharaoh’s guard. The two get along quite well. The narrator tells us that Joseph was “handsome and good-looking.” (Genesis 39:6b) To be honest I am not certain what the difference is between “handsome” and “good looking”—it sounds a little redundant to me. But maybe that’s the point. Joseph is very easy on the eyes.

 

Joseph ends up in an Egyptian prison for a crime he did not commit. He’s set up by Potiphar’s wife. But remember, Joseph is not only a dreamer but a dream interpreter. The way he gets out of jail free is to interpret a very strange dream of Pharaoh’s about seven fat cows and seven skinny cows and another one about and seven full ears of corn and then seven skinny ears. No one seems to be able to understand what it all means, except for Joseph. It comes easily to him, but to be honest, this particular dream is more about sound economic policy than an advanced seminar in Karl Jung. The dream means that there will be seven years of good crops followed by seven years of an economic downturn. So if Egypt is smart they will save up during the good years in order to be prepared for the lean ones. Joseph is promoted to become Secretary of Agriculture under Pharaoh to oversee that process and that is what they do.

 

In the meantime, Jacob and sons move on with their lives as best they can. But they have now hit upon tough times back in Canaan because it’s the seven lean years and no one told them to save up during the seven fat years. So Jacob sends his sons to Egypt looking to see if there is an economic stimulus package in the works coming out of Cairo. And that brings us to where we are today. 

 

Joseph recognizes his brothers immediately. But remember that when they last saw him he was just a kid. Now he is a successful and powerful political appointee in the Egyptian cabinet, and they simply do not recognize the man before them as their brother. If he has harbored bitter resentments toward them for all these years, now is his chance to get his pound of flesh. Now is his opportunity to have them thrown into a dark pit and left for dead and see how they like it. Revenge! So sweet!

 

But Joseph doesn’t do that. Instead he weeps so loudly that Pharaoh’s whole household hears him. And then he embraces his brothers.

 

Forgiveness. Can you imagine?

 

The late Walter Brueggemann said that this story is about the challenge to live our lives “between the hint of the dream, and the doxology of disclosure.” That’s good Old Testament theology but let’s break it down into plain English. We get these hints and guesses of God’s dream for this world, and we hope for the Kingdom of God to break in on earth as it is in heaven so we can one day sing praise God from whom all blessings flow! We pray for that Kingdom to come every time we gather for worship. Yet we live our lives between those two realities: between the already and the not yet, between the hint of the dream and the doxology of disclosure.

 

When someone suffers a trauma, as Joseph did, it’s easy to understand how that person’s nightmares will win out, and that person will be left embittered and blaming the world. Or blaming themselves. It’s easy to get stuck in a loop and feel there is no future. But if one is able to live “between the hint of the dream, and the doxology of disclosure,” one is already seeing that the story doesn’t end in that pit. The process of claiming new life, for Joseph, began long before that day his brothers appeared before him. As Andy Dufrasne puts it in The Shawshank Redemption, “you can get busy living or get busy dying.”  

 

Joseph has gotten busy living. And because of that, he has let go of the need to seek revenge on his brothers or for that matter to let them live rent free in his head. Instead, he wants to hug them. He wants to find out how his father is doing. He wants to get busy living.

 

So this Joseph story is an Easter story. It is about redemption and healing and new life and just as importantly it is about trusting that God is with us in the pit or a prison cell and in the depths of our deepest fears and pain, and even unto death on a cross on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

 

We, too, live between the hint of the dream and the doxology of disclosure. As St. Paul did, when he was sitting in a prison cell nearly two thousand years ago, yet hardly able to contain himself, writing to the Church in Philippi:

 

I thank God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now…I want you to know, beloved, that what has happened to me has actually helped to spread the gospel. (Philippians 1:3,4,12)

 

From prison, Paul writes that! He faced that same choice that Joseph faced: to get busy living or to get busy dying. He chose life. He chose to see God at work in his life even on the hardest of days and to find purpose and meaning in his imprisonment. He chose to live between the hint of the dream and toward the doxology of disclosure.

 

You and I are invited to follow these good examples. It’s hard, for sure. But praising God always leads to love of neighbor. Even those who have so terribly hurt us. I think of Don Henley’s words from “The Heart of the Matter.” I won’t sing them for you – it’s too early in the day for that. But perhaps you know them and you can sing them on your way home:

 

I’ve been tryin’ to get down to the heart of the matter, but my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter. But I think it’s about forgiveness. Forgiveness.

 

And of course I think of Eliza Hamilton, when it’s quiet uptown and she has been so hurt by Alexander’s infidelity and by the death of their son, Philip. And yet, she also chooses to live between the hint of the dream and the doxology of disclosure. As a faithful Christian woman, an Episcopalian in fact, she knows how to unlock the future. Forgiveness. Can you imagine?

 

By God’s grace, it happens in our lives from time to time, in small and sometimes in large ways. And when it does, it unleashes the power of God and it opens up grace upon grace and new possibilities. We need these old Bible stories, I think, because in our very real twenty-first century lives we, too, live “between the hint of the dream and the doxology of disclosure.”

 

So here is the thing I want to say to you today, friends: trusting that hint of the dream is what makes the doxology of disclosure possible. Acting on the hints and guesses that lead us to risk healing and reconciliation opens up, again and again invitations for us to see the living God at work in our lives. This is the work the Church is called to in this time and place: to not lose heart, to be agents of healing and reconciliation in a polarized world.

Before I leave you, Emmanuel, a book recommendation. A challenging one by one of my favorite theologians, Miroslav Volf, a Croatian born theologian who directs the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Last I heard, Volf was worshiping in the Episcopal Church in Guilford, Connecticut. In his book, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, Volf slows down the drama of an embrace as the key to reconciliation. The drama needs to be mirrored by the other. Simply put you cannot force someone to hug you. That’s not an embrace. You open, and you wait. They need to open, and wait, before an embrace can happen. We can practice this but it’s hard. Embrace is a dance, and reconciliation that leads to healing requires a partner.

 

What is happening in today’s Old Testament reading is a miracle and by God’s grace it happens for us every once in a while: old hurts are put aside and the future becomes possible. Forgiveness. Can you imagine?

May this Joseph story empower and equip us to be more hopeful and more courageous agents of healing and reconciliation, for the living of these days. Keep practicing doxology, so that from the hint of the dream we can open our own arms and lean into it, by God’s grace. 

Praise God. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise God, all creatures here below. Praise God the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer. Amen. 

Joseph and His Brothers: Part 1

On Sunday, August 9 and Sunday, August 16 I am serving at Emmanuel Church in Manchester-by-the-Sea, a summer chapel. I decided to preach the Joseph story in two parts, this Sunday being the first of those. The reading can be found here.

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...