June 5, 2016
Joseph | Genesis 37:12-36
- Genesis 37:12-36
- Rev. Dr. Jerry Deck
If you weren’t here last week, and at least a couple of you weren’t, let me quickly recap where we’ve been in our story of Joseph. Joseph was a 17-year-old boy and he had had a couple of dreams in which his family, primarily his older brothers, were bowing down to him. Like the annoying little brother that he is Joseph decided that he would be more than happy to share these dreams with his older brothers and his father and, not surprisingly, they were not overwhelmed with joy about the dream. In fact, we are told, the brothers hated him for it and his father, Jacob, rebuked him. But even though his father rebuked him, he also, we are told, kept the matter in mind, probably because he had lived out that same sort of dream in his own life and could not simply dismiss it out of hand.
And so this week we are told that the brothers had gone off to Shechem with their father’s flock. It should be pointed out that this is around 60 miles away which means that it is far out of shouting distance from where Jacob would be. But for some reason Joseph’s father thinks it would be a good idea to send the hated brother off on his own in search of the brothers who can’t stand him. (As we said last week, Jacob may not have been the sharpest tool in the shed.) Surely he must have known just how much Joseph’s brothers disdained him, and yet perhaps he hoped that some time alone together far away from him would miraculously cure what ailed them. So he calls Joseph to him. Joseph, like a good son quickly answers, “Here I am,” and just like that he is sent off to find his brothers.
Apparently the brothers see him when he is still quite a ways off and how do they know it’s him? Well, we’re not told, but my guess is it’s because of that colorful coat that their father had given to him. And can’t you just hear the sarcasm in their voice when they say, “Here comes this dreamer.” “Let’s kill him, throw him into a pit, say that a wild animal devoured him and then we’ll see what becomes of his dreams.” Now, I’m no psychologist, but it seems to me they have some real anger toward their little brother.
At this point Reuben, the eldest brother, doesn’t contest this idea out loud, but he does come up with a secret plan to deliver Joseph and so he talks them out of killing him right then and just throwing him into a pit with the hopes of coming back secretly to rescue him. These pits were scattered throughout the desert region in order to collect rainwater that could be used during the long dry periods. The brothers seemed to like this idea, so they stripped him of his robe (and Genesis makes sure to accentuate the fact that this was the fancy robe that he was wearing) and threw him into a pit. An empty pit, we are told, and then to make sure we heard it correctly, the text repeats itself, “there was no water in it.” In other words, no one was going to survive in it for long.
And then the brothers did what everyone does after trying to kill their brother which is to sit down and eat. Throwing someone into a pit works up quite the hunger apparently! And as they sit there eating their PB&Js and chips, a caravan of merchants came along. At this point Judah steps up and says, “You know, he is our brother, maybe we should just sell Joseph instead of having to go through the hard work of hiding his blood.” This seemed amenable to everyone except Reuben who, it seems, was not there.
I can only imagine that as they began to pull Joseph out of the pit how excited he must have been. They’d been kidding about the whole, “We’ll leave you in the pit thing.” “Here’s your fancy coat back.” “Now, pipe it down about those silly dreams.” But, of course, any of those thoughts would have been squashed as soon as they began to chain him up to the caravan. The momentary blip of joy and hope crushed by the chains of slavery.
When Reuben comes back he’s distraught, but his anguish fairly quickly turns into resourcefulness as they decide that it’s still better to go ahead and lie to their father about what had happened. They took the coat, mentioned again, and dip it in goat’s blood in order to show their father. As someone has pointed out, the coat given to confirm love is now given to confirm death. So, they approach their father and, in a remarkable sign of distancing themselves they ask not, “Is this our brother’s coat,” but, “Is this your son’s?” Immediately, Jacob jumps to the worst case scenario that Joseph has been killed by a wild beast and torn to pieces and his grief is so great that he refuses to be consoled and declares that he will mourn even unto death.
There’s one main thing that I thought about this week, but before I go there I do want to point out one other thing that I found interesting about this passage which is the glimpse it gives us into our human nature, to the decisions, oftentimes bad decisions, we make. At our staff meeting on Wednesday someone brought up almost the humorous line of Judah who can say with a straight face, “You know he is our brother, rather than killing him we should probably just sell him into slavery.” I mean, it just seems like such a dumb thing to say and yet, if I were to look back on my life (and probably not as far back as I’d like to think), there are some things that I’ve done or said that I just shake my head at now. What was I thinking?! So, while we may want to distance ourselves from the brother’s actions and our own, and while I certainly hope that none of us would kill our brother (or anyone!), my guess is that we are not as far away from doing foolish things as we might like to think. Especially, I might add, if we aren’t paying attention to the groups we are a part of, because so often it has been in groups that I’ve done some really dumb things.
There was a remarkable experiment done a while back that I read about recently. A group of people were shown two cards. [show slide] One of the cards had a single line and the other card had three lines that dramatically varied in length, but one of them was clearly the same length as the single line on the other card. They asked the participants in the group to say which line on the second card was the same length as the line on the first card. What they didn’t say out loud was that all in the group, except for one, were actors. So, the actors went first and picked one of the lines that was clearly wrong. Fascinatingly, a surprisingly high amount of the non-actors went along with the wrong answer of the actors and when questioned afterwards they said that they simply thought their own eyes must be deceiving them. That surely not everyone else was wrong.
It points out just how easily we are shaped by the people around us. I would suggest a couple of things from this experiment. First, make sure to surround yourself with people who aren’t going to lie to you! In other words, surround yourself with people who are going to be healthy and supportive and loving. Secondly, when we realize how easily the decisions we make are shaped by those around us, it’s probably wise to make sure that some of those who surround you don’t always agree with you. I think it’s incredibly challenging and helpful to have those around you who don’t agree with you because it forces you to question what you’re doing and, even if you still end up making the same decision, that questioning can really be helpful in producing wisdom. In our society we keep getting in thicker and thicker silos which, I think, incredibly unhelpful and unhealthy. Bad decisions are made when we don’t see the other side to things. I can’t help but think that if one or two more of Joseph’s brothers would have spoken out that perhaps things would have gone differently, that the groupthink would not have been strong and perhaps they would have made a wise decision that glorified God in a much greater way.
It’s a part of the reason why getting out into neighborhoods, communities and world is so important. Not only does it allow us to share the love and grace of Jesus, but in so doing it helps us begin to see what are the most important parts of following Jesus. What I’ve discovered in my time as a pastor is that when churches are isolated and just hanging out with themselves and those with whom they whole-heartedly agree they end up making about a thousand things important, but when Christians get out into the world and are challenged they end up beginning to see oh, okay, these are the several most critical things about our faith and they, in my opinion, become much wiser followers of Jesus.
But the main thing that really stood out to me this week about this passage was not just the bad decision we make and for which we may suffer, but also those things which we did not decide and yet we must suffer. That, for me, is what we see in this remarkable image of the pit. While Joseph could be accused of being annoying or even a braggart he certainly did nothing deserving of being thrown into the dark, lonely, dry pit. One of the fascinating things about that is that we aren’t told what Joseph is thinking or doing in that moment. Is he quiet or is he screaming for help? Is he weeping or is he stoic? Is he scared? Is he still confident in the dreams God has given him or is he doubting them? Is he wondering where God is? There’s a part of me that really wants to know, but there’s also a part of me that realizes that by not knowing each of us is more freely able to put ourselves in that pit and to provide the emotion, the thoughts, the actions that we would be engaging in. Most of us, of course, know exactly how we have reacted in these times when we have been thrown in a pit of no fault of our own.
I have to say that one of the most difficult parts of being a pastor is when someone comes in to talk to me about something that is going on in their life that is clearly unfair or painful. Those times when they are in a pit. More than anything else in the world I want to be able to give them an easy, clear, answer and yet, more often than not, I cannot. The first thing I do in those situations is that I try and give them permission to be upset, to be angry, to even question where God is. I feel the freedom to do that because of the psalms of lament that we have in our scripture where the psalmist is given the freedom to be as honest as possible about what he is thinking or feeling. About wondering where God is. Sometimes we feel so guilty in asking these questions that it actually makes our grief and pain even worse and I want people to know that God’s shoulders are big enough to handle their pain, their questions, their anger, their confusion. That pits do not mean that we’ve done something wrong or that God has abandoned us. That while we don’t know for sure, I feel fairly confident that Joseph was not just standing in the pit calm and collected with not a fear or doubt in his mind and that that is okay.
But as I’ve gotten older, as hard as this is for me to admit, I’ve also begun to see that there may be questions that will never, on this side of eternity, be fully answered. That’s not easy for a people like us who want answers or who want someone to blame. When I think about the time I’ve spent in the pits of life, whether it be the struggles I’ve had with my parents and their divorce, or the remarkable pain of a miscarriage or the many issues I’ve heard in my office about those who have been abused or suffered the death of someone much too young, I can certainly say that they have been opportunities to grow in wisdom, in empathy, in love for those are struggling. But in all honesty I’m not always sure that that growth is worth it or that I couldn’t think of better ways to have learned those things. There are times, in other words, when the light has not fully illuminated those dark places of the pit, when I’m still thirsty for more (or better) answers.
And I’ve come to see that while there absolutely needs to be time for freedom to ask hard questions to God and that there will certainly be a lot of times when we look back on this side of eternity and see exactly why that pit happened, that there are also times when we will ultimately have to have the faith to say, “I still don’t understand it, I still think there could be a better way, but I’m going to choose to trust that God is still good, that God is still in control, that God is still loving, that God is still at work.”
It’s being able to live into the last verse of our passage today. While Jacob is consumed by his mourning and his sons are consumed by their lies and their treatment of Joseph, Genesis tells us that “Meanwhile, the Midianites had sold Joseph in Egypt to Potiphar, one of Pharaoh’s officials, the captain of the guard.” Meanwhile, despite the pit that they were in, God was still at work. Meanwhile, despite the slavery that Joseph found himself in, the dream was still alive. Meanwhile, no matter how much they didn’t understand what was happening, no matter how many questions were unanswered, no matter how differently they thought things should be, no matter how dark their situation was, God was still present. God was still…God.
There comes a point in our lives when all of us are faced with the question of whether or not we believe in the “meanwhile” of God. In those places when we can’t see and even when may never be able to see, how God continues to be alive and at work despite our inability to see it or feel it. The “meanwhile” is what Hebrews 11 describes as faith: the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. Can you continue to hope even in those times in the pit that God is with you and that he is for you? It will not answer all of our questions right now or solve all the problems we are wrestling with, but if we can continue to hope and to believe it, it will allow us to move forward in this journey of faith and, in so doing, move closer to God and his plans for us.
Sisters and brothers our passage today gives us a remarkable glimpse into the real world in which we live. Times when we make mistakes and wonder what we were thinking and times when we are stuck in a pit, lonely, afraid, and thirsting for hope or for answers. In the midst of those times, we will oftentimes be left with the question of whether or not we trust that God can work even in the midst of our mistakes and that he is with us even in the midst of our questions and pain. Can we trust in the “meanwhile” that we cannot see? Can we have faith to believe in the forgiveness of God and in his goodness even when surrounded by darkness. My hope and my prayer is that we can be a people who are not afraid to keep hoping, to keep believing, to keep trusting in the God who walked with Jacob, with Joseph, with Joseph’s brothers and with us. No matter where you are right now, never forget that “meanwhile” God is with you. May it be so. Amen.