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Joseph Part 6: Genesis 41:1-32
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Sometimes, the great irony is that the smarter we are, the harder it is to keep our eyes wide enough and our hearts soft enough to realize that everything is an opportunity to learn something new. Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 1:Really glad to have you here. If we haven't met IRL, my name is Jeremy, and I'm part of the team here. But allow me just to say this as we begin on this Remembrance day. I know we've already taken a moment, but to remember well the sacrifice of those past is to work for peace in our present moment today. Lord, have mercy on us.
Speaker 1:Christ, have mercy on us. God, grant us peace this day. Now today, we also find ourselves in the midst of a series on the character of Joseph. This is actually week six of eight, and we are working our way through this story bit by bit. But today, we finally begin to turn the corner with Joseph a little bit.
Speaker 1:Because let's be honest here, this has been a pretty heavy story so far. I think we can say that. Joseph has been sold into slavery. He's been falsely accused. He's been forgotten in a pit.
Speaker 1:And finally today, things start to turn toward the good for Joseph. However, before we get to that, let's take a moment to look back and situate ourselves here. Because last week, we found Joseph at the real low point of his story. We've been following him sinking down, but last week he hit bottom. And it's interesting here that Joseph can be sold into slavery by his brothers and falsely accused by his master's wife and then tossed into prison by his boss, and yet the text signals his deepest, darkest moment with the phrase, the cup bearer did not remember Joseph.
Speaker 1:He forgot him. And there's something really profound there, isn't there? That trial and tribulation and suffering and grief are hard, but to be forgotten and to feel like we are left on our own, this is a very dark place to find ourselves. And one of my favorite songs, not by Pearl Jam, who are, of course, the greatest band in the history of rock and roll, but by another pretty good band, the British band, The Verge. Richard Ashcroft sings, I never pray, but tonight I'm on my knees.
Speaker 1:I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me. That's kind of it, isn't it? That sometimes what we need most is not for the pain to go away, not yet. That sometimes what we need is to know that someone sees what we're going through. And this is the brilliance of these ancient stories.
Speaker 1:It's why they endure and remain. It's why they're able to continue to inspire and fascinate and draw us in thousands of years after the fact. Because they're not just ancient, they are human. And the writers here may not understand anything about our world, but they certainly understand all of the same human emotion that we experience today. And they want to draw that out of us as we read.
Speaker 1:And so last week, we reached the end of chapter 40, and we are forced to sit with this line, the cup bearer did not remember Joseph. He forgot him. Now, even as I say that, most of us here will realize that the chapter and verse markers in our bibles were not particularly ancient. They were first added in the sixteenth century by a guy named Robert Estien for the sake of clarity. But you may not know this.
Speaker 1:In Hebrew manuscripts, there are some punctuation marks. There's something called a sofpasuk, which looks like a colon, and that's used to indicate essentially a sentence break. But even more rare, and therefore more significant, are the parashot. And these are final letters, either a psalmik or a p. They get added to the end of a section, and they indicate a full stop.
Speaker 1:And later, these were used to divide the weekly Torah readings in the synagogue. And in fact, the book of Genesis is broken up into 11 larger sections, and the tenth section is called, it ends with a pay right at the end of chapter 40 verse 23. And what that means is that for thousands of years, people have come to that moment that we did last week, and they have stopped there the way that we did. Because sometimes, we need to be reminded to pause our conversations in difficult moments. And we know this story is not over, and we know this story will continue, and today, we get to follow it as it does, but where we ended last week was not a mistake.
Speaker 1:Because not every sermon should bring you all the way back to happy. And not every church service needs to end with you in a cheery moment, and not every biblical story will end where you want it to. Because life is not always like that. And I think the writer of Genesis is fully aware of our tendency to move too quickly sometimes through the parts we don't like. And so he puts a parachute here to remind us to stop and not rush too quickly past the pit.
Speaker 1:And so if these last couple messages have been difficult for you, and perhaps because you all too readily identify with everything that Joseph is going through, or perhaps because you're just not used to church ending on difficult moments, then I want you to know that it's okay to pause and reflect and experience where you are fully right now. To create your own parachute, your semicolon, if you will, so that you can pause and collect and then prepare yourself for tomorrow well. Because this is the thing about the divine. God was never going to leave Joseph in the pit, but that's only because God was in the pit with him all the way through. So let's pray.
Speaker 1:And then let's begin to turn the page together. Gracious God who sits with us in the pit. As we begin to round the curve into a new season in Joseph's life, help us not to move too quickly through the season that you have for us right now in our lives. For those of us who feel like this story has uncovered wounds and hurts that have not yet been fully healed. Help us to use this space, this room even here today as safe space.
Speaker 1:Where we can bring those experiences, those memories, those hurts to you for healing balm. Help us to sense your presence with us. Restoring us, fixing us, repairing us. And then, for those of us who know we are ready to move forward into a new season with you, Help us to do that with courage, but also with the memory of where we've been and the compassion that has created in us. We want to believe in a better tomorrow.
Speaker 1:We want to believe that the page can turn, but we need to know that you are present here with us today. So thank you for your love, for your graciousness, and for your presence with us even when we forget. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Okay.
Speaker 1:Today, we begin to turn that new corner. But on the agenda, we have more than a bad day. Behold it was a dream, the difference between smart and wise, and the relationship between courage and peace. But we're gonna start right where we left off at the start of chapter 41 where we read, when two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream. Now, obviously, we're gonna go on today, and we are gonna talk about that dream here in a moment.
Speaker 1:But most scholars suggest that Pharaoh or Joseph, sorry, is in prison here for about eleven years in total. And I know this story moves quickly, but remember, it does not move quickly for Joseph. And this is really important to remember that sometimes our perception of time from the outside is very different from someone who feels like they're stuck in the midst of it. And rather than imposing our perception of when someone should or should not be ready to move on, sometimes we need to learn to simply listen to how someone experiences their world. But more than that, it's been eleven years in prison, and it's been two full years at this point, at this very low point in the pit where Joseph has been forgotten and abandoned by his friend.
Speaker 1:And look, this rock bottom lasts for years for Joseph. Like, sometimes you have a bad day, and sometimes you have a bad week, and sometimes you have a bad decade. And that's hard. And yet you are still not forgotten because the bible has room for more than just bad moments. And we need to remember that.
Speaker 1:So when two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream. He was standing by the Nile River when up out of the river there came seven cows, sleek and fat, and they grazed among the reeds. After them, seven other cows, ugly and gaunt, came up out of the Nile and stood beside those on the riverbank. And the cows that were ugly and gaunt ate up the seven sleek, fat cows, and then Pharaoh woke up. He went back to sleep again and had a second dream.
Speaker 1:Seven heads of grain, healthy and good, were growing on a single stalk. And after them, seven other heads of grain sprouted thin and scorched by the east wind. The thin heads of grain swallowed up the seven healthy full heads. Then Pharaoh woke up, it had been a dream. What a shocking revelation on the part of our narrator here.
Speaker 1:This was all a dream. And that might seem like a bit of strange comment for our narrators to make, but this is a whole story about dreams. Right? So far, we've seen Joseph have dreams that get him in trouble. We've seen cupbearers and bakers have dreams that result in very divergent experiences.
Speaker 1:Now we've got Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, having dreams as well. And it seems to be that part of what's happening here is a leveling of the playing field. You can be an arrogant kid or a disgraced prisoner or the king of an empire, and God will both speak to you and remain mysterious to you. You can translate that into whatever categories you want. You can be a scholar.
Speaker 1:You can be a theologian. You can be a pastor. Or you can be agnostic, and the divine voice will still surround you and confound you completely. This is just how it goes. Somehow trusting that those two things can coexist together, this is part of what we call faith.
Speaker 1:Because faith is necessarily humble, it has to be held with an open hand. But there's still this question. Why does the writer say it was a dream? And actually, we don't really see it in English here. But in Hebrew, here is that word hine that we talked about in the second week of this series.
Speaker 1:There, Joseph said, behold, I have had a dream. Here, what the text literally says is that Pharaoh awoke, and behold, it was a dream. And I think part of what's happening here is the writer is signaling not just that Pharaoh had a dream. And we we all know how dreams work. He went to sleep.
Speaker 1:He saw some crazy things. He woke up. That's a dream. We get it. The writer is signaling that God was in the dream, speaking in the dream.
Speaker 1:That's a very different thing. Right? See, the writer here knows that we all have dreams all the time, but that doesn't warrant a behold. Now sometimes, I wake up and I wonder what has seeped into my mind that has allowed it to come up with the imagery that I dream about. It's amazing, and yet, I don't roll over in the morning and say to Rachel, behold.
Speaker 1:Doesn't need that. In fact, very rarely do I say that. You gotta save that for the right moments. That's a marriage tip for you. But I don't even try to deny this one.
Speaker 1:Everyone here has had that dream where you go to school and you make it halfway through the day and you're sitting in class and all of a sudden you look down and you realize you forgot to put on pants that day. And where does that come from? Certainly not from God. No one ever in the history of the world has ever gotten halfway through their day before they realized they were half naked. They forgot to put on pants and no, lululemon leggings don't count.
Speaker 1:Never does it happen. It doesn't come from God, but we dream it because we all have neuroses about identity and shame and body image and nakedness. So no behold is necessary there. When I was in my thirties, I went back to school to do my grad work. And when I did, I started having the dream that I had in my undergrad all over again.
Speaker 1:That dream where somehow you've reached the end of the semester, and you realize that there's that one class that you forgot to go to all year. And you did none of the work, and now you need that class to graduate, and now you won't. And I don't know if you had that dream, but I had it in my thirties, and I hated it. But it wasn't a message from God. It was just part of how my brain dealt with stress.
Speaker 1:Now, today, we know something about dreams and how they are part of how our subconscious processes information and imagination. And the writers of Genesis don't really have a working knowledge of all that. But they do seem to know that some dreams are just dreams. To quote Scrooge McDuck as he talks to Marley's ghost, You may be a bit of undigested beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an undone potato, but there's more gravy than grave about you, whatever you are. And yes, I know that's Dickens, so I could have quoted Scrooge, but when do you ever get a chance to quote Scrooge McDuck?
Speaker 1:So I went for it. But the point is sometimes a ghost is just an overactive imagination. Sometimes a dream is just a dream. And sometimes when my son comes in my room at 3AM because he's had a nightmare, I have to explain to him that dreams aren't real. And yet, behold, it was a dream.
Speaker 1:And what I would say about this is that sometimes there is work to be done to know the difference. Like, not every great idea you have comes from God. I'm sorry. And not every notion that pops into your head is planted there by Jesus. There's not every emotion you feel is the urging of the Holy Spirit that this is the one you should marry her.
Speaker 1:We are, all of us, a very complex mix of brain and body and soul and mind. We are conscious and we are unconscious. And often it takes real intentionality to sift out where God meets us in that mix. Now, sometimes, that takes prayer, and sometimes that takes time. And I would suggest that oftentimes, what it takes is community.
Speaker 1:Because sometimes what we really need is each other to help us understand the difference between just a dream and behold a dream. But Pharaoh seems to sense that this is the latter. And so we read in verse eight that in the morning his mind was troubled, and so he sent for all the magicians and wise men of Egypt. Pharaoh told them about his dreams, but no one could interpret them for him. Now in Egypt, there is this real sense that wisdom is magic.
Speaker 1:And you see this later in the encounter between another pharaoh and Moses. When Moses confronts pharaoh, it's the magicians that pharaoh summons to counter him. And here, the NIV has gone with magicians and wise men, but probably better here would be something like the wise and magical men. Because there actually aren't two categories in the Hebrew here, it's just two descriptors or two adjectives to describe the same group. But all of this is very different than the Hebrew concept of wisdom.
Speaker 1:Bobby did a series on Proverbs earlier this year, and you can backtrack with her on our website if you wanna do that. But one of her key points was about how in Hebrew literature, wisdom is a lived experience. So it's not just intelligence. Wisdom isn't being the smartest person in the room. Wisdom is living well.
Speaker 1:She said at one point that wisdom is what puts everyday knowledge and love within our actual reach so that we can find the divine hiding out in the contours of our actual lives. This is one of the real insights in the Joseph story. There's a difference between being the smartest person in the room and the wisest person in the room. I mean, you get the sense as you read that Joseph is always the smartest person. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, he's the one who supervises his older brothers. He's the one who gets put in charge of Potiphar's house. He's the one who runs the prison, and yet he has to become wise over the course of his story. This is really important for us to internalize that wisdom isn't magic. It doesn't come out of nowhere.
Speaker 1:It doesn't just happen. It's learned and lived and gathered and it's earned. And too often, I think, we think wisdom is magic. Like, either we have it or we don't. When really, we are all being offered wisdom all the time in every experience.
Speaker 1:The question is what we do with it. Right? Like, every success, every failure, every moment of joy, every deep and painful second of sorrow, wisdom, to be cliched, is what we take from those experiences. Sometimes, the great irony is that the smarter we are, the harder it is to keep our eyes wide enough and our hearts soft enough to realize that everything is an opportunity to learn something new. So without being trite here, Joseph is gifted his wit, but there's nothing magic about his wisdom.
Speaker 1:Because it is hard earned through very difficult moments in his story. And I would wager that your wisdom is too. So don't discount it because it is hard won and you earned it. So the magicians can't help. But we read that the cup bearer said to Pharaoh, today I am reminded of my shortcomings.
Speaker 1:And that's kind of a nice way to put it, you slime ball. Your shortcomings, give me a break, you forgot your friend in prison for two years. But what the text actually says here in Hebrew is, today I'm reminded of my sins. And I I think this is really significant here because sometimes we miss things. Right?
Speaker 1:We hurt someone. We ignore someone. We overlook someone. Sometimes we forget someone. And we don't notice what we've done.
Speaker 1:And sometimes, sometime later, we become aware of it and we're not really sure what to do about that. I can think of times when I said something to someone without knowing the full story, only later to be mortified by how I could have missed it so badly. I can think of times when completely unintentionally I hurt someone, and only after the fact, like, too long after the fact that I realized what had happened. But I mean, what are you gonna do about it at that point? Right?
Speaker 1:It's better to just forget it and move on, but that's wrong. Look. I'm not saying that you dig up every mistake and try to rehash every old wound, but I am saying that when the spirit brings something to mind, and your sense is that you're not gonna make things worse, that maybe you can bring healing even if it's going to be a little awkward, And today, I'm reminded of my shortcomings can be a really beautiful sentence to repeat. And it's one that I want the wisdom to hold on to in my vocabulary for when I need it. But the cup bearer then tells Pharaoh about Joseph, explains how he had a dream and Joseph interpreted it, and how it all came to be just as Joseph said.
Speaker 1:And so Pharaoh says, let's meet him. And in verse 14, we read that Pharaoh sent for Joseph and he was quickly brought up from the dungeon. Now, there's that word that we talked about last week, the pit. And it's interesting here that Joseph is not brought from the biot, the prison, he's brought up from the pit or the dungeon. And once again, this is not talking about his housing arrangement.
Speaker 1:He's not in a dungeon. This is about his emotional space. Because this is good news after a very long drought. And Pharaoh says, look, I need a dream interpreted. I hear you're the man.
Speaker 1:Let's see what you got. And in a pretty bold move, Joseph says, I can't do it, but God will give Pharaoh the answer he desires. Look, when you are talking to Pharaoh who is literally a god in his kingdom, This is probably not the safest response. But Pharaoh is desperate, and so he relays the dream to Joseph, and Joseph knows exactly what it all means. He says the dreams of pharaoh are one and the same.
Speaker 1:God has revealed to pharaoh what God is about to do. The seven good cows are seven years, and the seven good heads of grain are also seven years. It's one and the same dream. The seven lean, ugly cows that came up afterward are seven years, and so are the seven worthless heads of grain scorched by the east wind. Seven years of great abundance are coming throughout the land of Egypt, but seven years of famine will follow.
Speaker 1:And what's really interesting here is that this is not, by any stretch, a remarkably insightful interpretation. Look. Egypt is a massive empire at this point. An incredible force in the world and Pharaoh, as the head of that empire, is a walking talking deity among his people. He is literally the image of God on earth in Egyptian theology.
Speaker 1:All of that power directly or indirectly comes from the Nile River. Egypt controls that river and they even have a, a deity in their pantheon called Hapi. That's h a p I, not h a p p y. But Hapi is the god of the Nile flood. And that's because every year, the banks of the Nile would swell, and that would deposit silt along the banks, and that was incredibly fertile, and that would push water out into the fields, and that could be diverted for agricultural purposes, and that enabled the entire Egyptian economy to thrive.
Speaker 1:So their food and agriculture, their taxation and military, their theology and religion, all of it was tied directly to the ability of the Nile River to provide for Egypt. So to hear a dream about sleek healthy cows who come up out of the Nile and graze on its reeds only to be swallowed up by hungry, starving cows that devour them, or to listen to a dream about healthy stocks of grain that grow up from a single point of origin only to be devoured by emaciated stocks scorched by desert sun and wind. This is not really a hard dream to interpret. In fact, it might suggest that any interpreter of dreams familiar with Egypt and worth their salt knew exactly what these images would portend. So the problem doesn't seem to be interpretation.
Speaker 1:The problem actually seems to be the courage to say it. And just like Joseph's dreams at the start of the story, everyone knew what they meant. That wasn't the problem. The problem here is no one wants to say it. And this gets really interesting the more closely we look at what Joseph says when he's first introduced to Pharaoh.
Speaker 1:Because I read from the NIV earlier where in verse 16, Joseph says, God will give Pharaoh the answer Pharaoh desires. But it's really not what he says at all. What he says in Hebrew is, Shalom, Paro, which is more literally something like, God will answer Pharaoh with peace. Now, Pharaoh certainly does not get the answer Pharaoh desires from his dream. I mean, no one desires seven years of famine for their kingdom.
Speaker 1:But I think you could argue that he does get a measure of peace by understanding what's coming. And this goes back to our question of wisdom. Because none of his magicians have the courage to tell him the truth. But there is a peace in the wisdom to speak plainly and honestly with each other even when hard words need to be said. Look, bad news is not the end of you.
Speaker 1:And yet sometimes when we refuse to hear it Or we stop short of saying it or we know what's in front of us but we can't muster the courage to name it or face it. What happens is that bad news actually becomes terminal. And sometimes, what we really need in order to find peace is to hear bad news and own it. To mourn over it and plan for it, to sit with it and digest it, to allow it to speak to us and through us, to change us and rearrange us, and then point us in some new direction forward. Because sometimes what we don't want to hear is exactly what we need to hear.
Speaker 1:And sometimes peace is waiting only on the other side of someone with the wisdom to say what needs to be said. Look, Joseph is not a magician in this story. Joseph is someone who has been through really hard times. And those hard times have not ended him. They've made him courageous and wise and willing now to say what needs to be said.
Speaker 1:And sometimes, you will need those people around you, and sometimes you are that person for someone near you. Because smart is knowing what a dream means. Wise is knowing what needs to be said about it in order to bring peace to it. And that is always earned. And so the end of a story about dreams and hard words and having the courage to say what no one wants to say, my prayer for you is that you might dream well and listen well and learn well.
Speaker 1:Also, that you might become wise and courageous as you do, so that when you need to speak, will be more than smart. And, you will have the wisdom to bring all of your experience to bear, to speak truth that brings peace that defies expectations and reaches past what someone wants you to say, to the earned wisdom that speaks truth and brings real peace to those who need to hear what you have to say. Let's pray. God. All of us have had dreams that led us down the wrong path.
Speaker 1:Where we followed our passions and we fell down hard. And yet, we pray that even in the midst of that recovery, you would remind us that the fact that it didn't work out is not an indication that you don't speak. That there are dreams that are real and There is passion that you've put inside of us. That there are people around us and near us who can help us hear what needs to be said. So that we can sift through and find that kernel of excitement, and passion, and dream, and focus that you have planted inside of us.
Speaker 1:And, God, we ask that when the time is right, you would give us the courage to get back up and follow that dream where it leads us. God, might we also then, through all of that wisdom that is earned through our missteps and our failures and our trying again. Find the courage to speak real truth to each other. Because we don't want to say just what we want to hear, we want to speak real truth Even in hard words. So that each of us can take bad news, metabolize it, prepare for it, and know that it won't end us because you are with us through the story.
Speaker 1:God, may we be wise and courageous. May we bring grace and peace to those near us. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.