Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Joseph Part 3: Genesis 37:12-36
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
See, Joseph is a story about someone who didn't fit in a lot of different ways. Welcome to the Commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to .church for more information.
Speaker 1:Welcome today. My name is Jeremy. I'm part of the team here at Commons, and thanks for joining us on a Sunday when we are celebrating with so many families across our community as they dedicate and baptize their children. It's a real honor for us to get to participate in these types of moments. Now, that said, we are also continuing our series on the character of Joseph, and we're kind of right into the story now.
Speaker 1:Two weeks ago, we started with a look at his family lineage. It was Abraham and Jacob and where he comes from as a character. And then last week, we dove right into Joseph. And we started in Genesis 37 where Joseph is first introduced to us. But there were already some interesting ideas already there in that opening piece.
Speaker 1:First of all, if you already know that Joseph is the hero of the story, then his introduction is kind of surprising. First thing we're told about him is that he's a tattletale. Second thing we learn is that he thinks he's in charge of his older brothers. Third thing is that his father loves him the best. Next is that he's been given an elaborate coat that sets him apart from all of his brothers, and then finally, that he has these grandiose dreams about himself where all of his family, including his mother and father, come and bow down before him.
Speaker 1:And he has no problem sharing those dreams with everyone around him. As I said last week, this is a kid who has had everything handed to him except any sense of self awareness, and that's a bad thing. I have a five year old living in my home right now, and I am very aware of what a lack of self awareness looks like. My son turned five about a month ago, and we were driving home on his birthday, and he was in the back, and he had been thinking about his birthday all day. And he said to me, daddy, when I press this pretend black button beside me, it will launch celebrations across the city for my birthday.
Speaker 1:Cupcakes and celebrations and balloons in every store and every backyard. I call it the celebration bomb and it's amazing. And I said, one, that's great. And two, I hope you're not disappointed by what we actually have planned. I don't think Nenshi is showing up, if you know what I mean.
Speaker 1:But for me, the real crux of this opening story is in Joseph's dad's response to the dream. Because Jacob rebukes him, but then the text says that Jacob kept the matter in mind. He held it in his heart. And I really love this part of the story because it resonates so deeply with my experience of the world. That sometimes, some things are completely true, and yet not ready to be shared publicly.
Speaker 1:You see, Joseph's dreams are real, and God is in them, and they will come to pass. So the problem isn't the dream, the problem is Joseph. Because Joseph doesn't yet understand that some things are just for him to hold. And so here in Genesis, we are talking about literal dreams and visions, but to me this is so obviously also about all of the ways that the divine speaks and guides and leads us into ourselves. I talked last week about how maybe you shared an insight and it was taken the wrong way.
Speaker 1:Or maybe you shared a dream too early with the wrong people and it got shut down hard. And maybe because of that, you thought that the dream was wrong and you abandoned it and you left it behind, and maybe it just wasn't the right time yet. Because sometimes your dreams have to earn the right to go public. Now, today, we have to talk about what happens when good brothers go bad. But first, let's pray.
Speaker 1:God of welcome and embrace, we come to you today with open hearts, and with wounded hearts, and with hearts that are fearful because we have been rejected before. And we hope that you might meet our anxiety with grace. As we read a story about rejection today, might we be able to acknowledge our pain in this moment and recognize the spaces where we still hurt, and in your grace learn to turn that into welcome for another. Fill our words with the breath of spirit and allow us to see new vision and hope and possibility for tomorrow as we speak. Remind us of the delicate beauty of your self giving love.
Speaker 1:In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Okay. Today, we are going to talk about paying attention, self awareness, Machiavellian plans, and all those times we just don't fit in. But let's dive in right where we left off in verse 12 of Genesis 37, because we got a lot to cover today, so we're gonna move quickly.
Speaker 1:It says, now his brothers had gone to graze their father's flocks near Shechem. And Shechem is about 50 kilometers north of Hebron, so this is a good ways away. And Israel, that's Jacob's father, said to Joseph, as you know, your brothers are grazing the flocks near Shechem. Come, I'm going to send you to them. Very well, he replied.
Speaker 1:So he said to him, go and see if all is well with your brothers and the flocks, and bring word back to me that he sent him off from the Valley Of Hebron. Now, couple things here that are obscured in the English a little bit. First of all, we know that Joseph's brothers hate him. Verse four. When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him.
Speaker 1:Verse five, Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more. Verse eight, his brother said to him, do you intend to rule us? And they hated him even more because of his dream and what he had said. Well, now dad says, hey, Joseph. Why don't you go for a walk in the wilderness 50 kilometers away by yourself and see what's up with your brothers?
Speaker 1:Does that sound like a good idea? Well, that's weird. But there's also a strange repetition here that we don't really see in the English. And it's actually the repetition of the word shalom. Jacob says, go and see if there is shalom with your brothers and shalom with the flocks.
Speaker 1:Now, shalom means peace in Hebrew, but it's actually a really important word in Hebrew. Because it doesn't just mean peace in the sense of an absence of violence. It means peace in the sense of wholeness, and health, and goodness, and relationship. And so, for the narrator to repeat peace, peace, peace, after hate, hate, hate. This is about us as a reader understanding that Jacob as a father really has no idea what's happening with his sons.
Speaker 1:And that's interesting because we saw Jacob get upset with Joseph's dream last week when it involved him bowing down before him. And yet, he seems to have completely missed the fact that it might also have been offensive to his other sons as well. We see this in our culture. Right? Someone will say, hey, this is my experience of the world.
Speaker 1:And other people will say, well, I've never seen that. That can't possibly be true. Right now, we have women speaking publicly about all of the things that they do to protect themselves from sexual violence, and then we have men saying, well, that's crazy. I don't do those things, and I've never been assaulted. You must just be paranoid.
Speaker 1:But the problem is, if we don't develop the capacity to place ourselves within someone else's shoes, or at least to attempt to see the world through their experience of it, then we risk ending up with the same kind of incomplete view of the world that Jacob has here. And so, because Jacob got to say his piece, as far as he's concerned, everything's okay now. Except that his other sons haven't been heard. And because of that, it's their frustration and their anger and their jealousy toward Joseph that's driving them. And maybe in part, that's even made worse because their father won't acknowledge it.
Speaker 1:I mean, being upset with someone because they have wronged you in some way, and no one around you, none of the people who are supposed to support you seem to notice that. That might even push you to do some drastic things. So all the ways that we listen to each other, that we hear each other, the ways we work to understand how others are processing their world, that is more than just being kind. This is all part of how we save each other from some of our worst mistakes. But, story continues.
Speaker 1:It says, when Joseph arrived at Shechem, a man found him wandering around in the fields and asked him, what are you looking for? He replied, I'm looking for my brothers. Can you tell me where they are grazing their flocks? Well, they moved on from here, the man answered. I heard them say let's go to Dothan.
Speaker 1:So Joseph went after his brothers and found them near Dothan. This is sort of a strange little interlude. We don't know who this man is. He never shows up again. We don't know what his relationship to the brothers was, but this seems to be here to show that Joseph is having to go farther and farther away from the safety of his father to find his brothers.
Speaker 1:At Dothan is about another 20 kilometers past Shechem. And so as a reader, you're supposed to be getting a little nervous now. As Joseph goes farther and farther away from home. Because remember, we know that Joseph is not the most capable of his brothers. You know, he's the one who wears fancy clothes.
Speaker 1:He doesn't like to spend his time in the fields. I remember last week, he likes to think of himself more as a supervisor than a shepherd. And even when this man finds Joseph, the text says that he finds him wandering around, but literally what it says is he's making mistakes in a field. And the idea here is that Joseph is lost. But part of the problem seems to be that Joseph doesn't seem to know that.
Speaker 1:Again, it's just this little nod from the writer to the lack of self awareness that really seems to be driving Joseph at this point in the story. It's this idea that understanding how others perceive you and spending time to know yourself, your strengths, weaknesses, what you do well and what you don't, this is time well spent. And I know it's just a very small part of the story, but whether it's a counselor or a therapist, whether it's just learning your Enneagram type or simply asking people around you that you trust about what they see in you, Investment to know yourself, that will pay off. So, Joseph went after his brothers and he found them near Dothan. But, they saw him in the distance.
Speaker 1:Before he reached them they plotted to kill him, and this is not good stuff. Right? Joseph may be an entitled brat, but this is downright evil. The language here is really meant to illustrate the ways that evil can become normal for us. It says they plotted.
Speaker 1:This is actually a fairly rare Hebrew word, but it's never used positively in the bible. It's a word for deception, and scheming, and manipulation, and evil planning. But then it says that they plotted to put him to death. And what's funny here is that the language there doesn't describe murder. It actually describes like a judicial killing or a legal sentencing.
Speaker 1:The idea being that what they are planning is evil, absolutely no question, 100% wrong, and yet, in their minds, like, they've somehow just made this okay. They've justified it and rationalized it. And when you read this in Hebrew, it's a really weird sentence because there's this odd juxtaposition, and it sounds something like they hatched a Machiavellian plan to uphold justice and do what needed to be done. You're meant to be jarred by that a bit. Don't tell me you haven't done that before somewhere in your life.
Speaker 1:Every one of us has. Where at some point we convinced ourselves of the virtue in something terrible. And our ability to honestly evaluate our motives and our actions, it's our self awareness once again. That is everything at times. Here comes the dreamer, they said to each other.
Speaker 1:This is fun too. As what it actually says here is, here comes the master dreamer. You could even translate this, here comes the one who is married to his dreams. And if you somehow thought that sarcasm was a modern invention, and you were the first to do it well, sorry, we've been doing this long before Facebook came around. Come now, they said.
Speaker 1:Let's kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns. And we'll say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we'll see what comes of his dreams. So plan is pretty basic at this point. We're going to kill him.
Speaker 1:We'll throw him in a hole. We'll tell dad he was eaten by a wild animal. But again, writer in the story is just so much fun to read. Because this phrase ferocious animal is in Hebrew, and literally that means an evil beast, but we've actually heard that description before. It was way back in verse two when Joseph brought a bad report or a to his father about his brothers.
Speaker 1:And so he brought an evil report about them. Now they're gonna bring an evil report about him. Because the writer wants you to know that this is about revenge. We're getting him back. And when you don't deal with your hurt, and where it comes from, and how it's building inside of you, then you will inevitably find yourself passing it along somewhere along the line.
Speaker 1:But at this point, it's one of his brothers, Reuben, who has a moment of clarity. So he jumps in with this plan to rescue Joseph. He says, let's not take his life. Don't shed any blood. I mean, throw him in the cistern here in the wilderness, sure, but don't lay a hand on him.
Speaker 1:Now Reuben said this in an attempt to come back and rescue him and take him back to his father later. So when Joseph came to his brothers, they did this. They stripped him of his robe, the ornate robe he was wearing. They took him and they threw him into a cistern. The cistern was empty.
Speaker 1:There was no water in it. And they sat down to eat their meal, and again, talk about justifying your crimes here. They take their brother, they strip him, they throw him in a pit, and then they decide to tuck in for a little snack together. But they look up, and a caravan of Ishmaelites is coming from Gilead. And their camels were loaded with spices, balm, and myrrh, and they were on their way to take them down to Egypt.
Speaker 1:So Judah said to his brothers, well, what will we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood? Come, let's sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him. After all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood. And his brothers agreed. So a lot to talk about here, and this is the final section we'll look at today.
Speaker 1:First of all, we have Ruben, who seems to be a good guy. Right? He has a bit of a conscience, and he doesn't want to kill his brother. He hopes to get him home safely to dad. But he also can't seem to bring himself to say something directly to his brothers.
Speaker 1:Now, maybe there's good reason for that in his mind. And maybe he thinks they will turn on him next, but that's kind of the crux of it, isn't it? What are we willing to risk to do the right thing? Very likely, you and I will never be presented with this exact scenario, having to talk our siblings out of a murder, at least I sincerely hope you are never forced with that. But I have certainly found myself wanting to say something and then choosing not to.
Speaker 1:If our expression of justice is simply waiting until after the fact to go up to someone and say, I'm sorry you had to go through that. Maybe we need to rethink things a bit. Walter Brueggemann is a scholar in the Old Testament. He says that Reuben here is presented as responsive but cowardly, and killers of dreams will not be restrained by responsible cowards. I love that.
Speaker 1:Let me say it again here. Ruben is presented as responsive but cowardly, and killers of dreams will not be restrained by responsible cowards. And I think part of what this means is that all of us need to learn to lead into the changes we want to see, maybe before the crisis falls on us. I mean, what if Reuben had been calling out the way that his brothers talked about Joseph before this decisive moment? Alright.
Speaker 1:What if he recognized the toxicity that was building in their attitudes towards their brother before this point and said something about it? I mean, what if men were more conscious about calling each other out for misogynistic jokes regardless of whether there were any women present? Or if white people were more conscious about paying attention to the experience of people of color around us, what if I paid more attention to my words and how they unintentionally dismiss someone's experience in the world, whether I mean to do that or not? All of it means that we do our best to stay conscious of the world that's around us before we find ourselves on the edge of a crisis. Then we got Judah, and he doesn't want to kill his brother either, but that's only because it doesn't get him anything.
Speaker 1:Judah said to his brothers, what will we gain if we kill him? Come, let's sell him. He is our brother after all, our own flesh and blood. What a humanitarian Judah is in this story. Right?
Speaker 1:But again, let's be honest with ourselves here. We do this from time to time. Right? We buy product red because we get to feel good and still go shopping. Or we act environmentally as long as it doesn't inconvenience us too much.
Speaker 1:Even Stephanie McMahon, head of World Wrestling Entertainment, that bastion of good news in the world, was quoted last year saying that, philanthropy is the future of marketing. That's the way that brands are going to win today. Look, I got no issue with partnerships. Sometimes some things really can be a win all around. Of course they can.
Speaker 1:Social enterprise is one of the really compelling solutions to inequality that we have at our disposal right now. But if your altruism is exclusively generated by the benefit you stand to receive, if you're not killing Joseph, but selling him instead and calling that good. And maybe there's a problem with how our conception of the world is formed. As Judah is no hero here. But that brings us to probably one of the most fascinating elements in the entire Joseph story.
Speaker 1:Because there are two conspicuous repetitions in this section, and I think they relate to each other. First, when Joseph shows up, the text says that he came to his brothers and they stripped him of his robe, his ornate robe that he was wearing. They threw him in a cistern. And then later, when Judah suggests they sell his brother, he says, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood after all. Literally, he is our brother and our blood after all.
Speaker 1:And a lot of times, these kind of repetitions sort of get smoothed out in English. They don't flow well, and so we just fix them. Sort of like when Jacob said earlier, go to see if there is peace with your brothers and peace with the flocks. That feels unnecessary to us, and so we just smooth it out in English. But when you see these types of repetitions in English, things like, they stripped him of his robe, his ornate robe, or he is our brother and our blood.
Speaker 1:What's happening here is that the translators want to signal that something too important to ignore is happening. It's like a little flag saying, pay attention to this. So let's talk about the robe, and then let's talk about this brother and blood business. Last week, I said that this multicolored robe is a bit of a mystery to us, and that's true. The phrase here is ketoneit passim.
Speaker 1:Ketoneit is the word for tunic, and that I'm on the end of passim means it's a plural. This is where we get the idea that maybe this was a patchwork garment made of many fabrics. Or this is when the phrase gets translated into Greek in the Septuagint, where the meaning shifts to a garment of many colors. But the problem with ketonet passim is that it doesn't show up anywhere else in Torah. It shows up twice in the story.
Speaker 1:Once when his fathers give it to him, and then again when his brothers take it from him. That's it. And so for the most part, the meaning has to be inferred from the story. It's pretty clear that this ketonet sets him apart in some way, and it's plural, but it's a little unclear exactly what that means. Except that this term does actually show up one other place in the Bible.
Speaker 1:Now it's in second Samuel, and it's a different part of Hebrew literature. Genesis is part of Torah. Samuel is part of the Nevi'im. But there's a story in second Samuel chapter 13, and it's a terrible story about one of David's sons, Amnon, who thinks he's in love with his sister Tamar, but she refuses his advances, and so he rapes her. The text says that because of this awful evil thing that he has done, his love for her is consumed and turned into hatred.
Speaker 1:He has her thrown out of his house by his guards, and it's a terrible story. But it says that Tamar went into mourning after this, and that she tore the ornate robe she was wearing, the ktonet passim, for this was the kind of garment that the virgin daughters of the king wore. Now, within the biblical text, that is the only other reference that we have to make sense of this ornate robe that Joseph wears. Does that mean they're talking about the same thing? No.
Speaker 1:First of all, there's no king in Genesis. The category doesn't exist yet in Israel, and in fact, the nation of Israel doesn't even exist yet at this point in the story. Second, the Nevi'im is written much later than Torah. It's almost positive that the word has shifted and taken on a very specific meaning during that time. But it does seem to at least suggest that perhaps part of the problem that his brothers had with Joseph was that they thought he dressed like a girl.
Speaker 1:And if you go back and you look at the introduction of his father Jacob, we're told that he was a soft man who stayed at the tents with his women while his brother Esau went out and hunted. And maybe part of the reason that Jacob loved Joseph so much was that he saw a bit of himself in there. The fact that he felt rejected by his father as well. And in fact, if you follow the story into Egypt, a culture with very different ideas about masculinity from what was expected in Semitic cultures, there you'll see that Joseph is welcomed and seen as a quote, beautiful handsome man. And don't tell me this is just a story about ancient masculinity.
Speaker 1:Because every man here in the room has, at some point, been conditioned by our culture to suppress their emotion and to not cry. And I still catch myself in moments about to use gendered language when I talk to my son about his larger feelings. Some of us don't experience gender the same way. Some of us don't experience attraction the same way, and I think part of what we might be seeing here is that Joseph just doesn't fit within the categories he was expected to. And so I wonder if this is why.
Speaker 1:After they strip him of his robe, his ornate robe, which his father gave him, and they couldn't stand, his brother Judah says, well, we can't kill him. He is our brother and our blood after all. Almost like, I don't know what to do with him either, but he is still one of us. Right? Right?
Speaker 1:See, Joseph is a story about someone who didn't fit in a lot of different ways. Absolutely, as we saw last week, he doesn't help things much. He's arrogant at times, and he's blind to his family and others. He didn't think about how his words would affect those around him, but sometimes when we feel like we're on our own, we start to act like we're on our own. And I think one of the really compelling parts of this entire Joseph narrative is watching this person who is continually pushed to the outside become slowly over time someone who graciously learns to welcome others back in.
Speaker 1:This is really the kernel of the story for me here. Because at some point, every one of us are going to be the outsider. And for some of us, that will be more pointed and more hurtful, and that's hard, and I'm sorry. But at some point, every one of us will be pushed to the edges, and we will have to choose whether we armor up and close off and we turn on others the way that they have scapegoated us. Or whether we, like Joseph, will learn to lean into that hurt and metabolize that pain and take all the ways that we were pushed aside and to turn that into welcome and embrace for those who need it the most.
Speaker 1:Because at the end of the story, when Joseph meets these same brothers again and they bow down before him. It's Joseph who stands them back up. And so perhaps, part of what Joseph shows us is that sometimes it's the sting of rejection. It's that sense of feeling like we don't fit. That reminds us of just how truly beautiful and open welcome can be when extended.
Speaker 1:And so for all the ways that you have been pushed aside, in all the categories that you have not been able to fit inside, for all the ways that you weren't man enough, or strong enough, or smart enough, or beautiful enough for those around you. May you know that you are absolutely loved today. And may you turn your hurt into welcome for someone else, So that you can heal the world in some small way because you follow Joseph's footsteps. Let's pray. God, in some way, every one of us have felt what it is to be pushed aside or to not be able to fit ourselves within the expectations that someone else has for us.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it was a stranger, sometimes it was someone close to us, but we felt the sting of that rejection. And we had the option at that point to close down and armor up and push people away or by your spirit. To turn that hurt into grace, and that rejection into welcome. And God, we pray that in all the ways that we have felt that sting, you would be there near us, healing us, reminding us of a new way forward modeled on your son. God, might we become one small step at a time full of grace and peace, And might we bring your kingdom to the world as we welcome and embrace and love people the way that you did.
Speaker 1:Might our choices contribute to an earth that looks a little bit more like heaven. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.