June 26, 2016
Joseph | Genesis 41:1-32
- Genesis 41:1-32
- Rev. Dr. Stan Johnson
Good morning. I am Stan Johnson, and until May 3, 2015 I was the senior pastor of the 1st Presbyterian Church of Quincy, MA. I share this fact, and will take a moment to introduce myself, so that you might have a context by which you might better understand what I will share with you from Mark’s Gospel. I was born and raised in Salinas, CA (John Steinbeck country); graduated from UC Berkeley in 1971—at the conclusion the “Hippie Era,” but “missed” Kent State in 1970, when I was an intern with a missionary/evangelism team in Johannesburg, SA. After Berkeley, I attended Princeton Seminary; became a campus pastor in Southern California; then did some graduate work at Notre Dame. Through some unexpected, painful twists and turns, I became the Associate Pastor in New Castle, IN for nine years, before becoming the pastor of the Quincy church in 1995. Again, I share these highlights, in order that you might turn to one another and ask: “Did you understand him—I got lost? I guess that’s what we should expect from someone who has spent most of his life in MA and CA. CA: like a cereal box, filled with nuts, fruits and flakes.
Introduction:
Years ago, when I would read the words of the Psalmist, blessed is the one whose “delight is in the law of the LORD and on His law … meditates day and night,” I would shake my head and think: “I can imagine little less delightful than meditating upon any laws.” But then I came to understand that the word, “law” (תוֹרַ֥ת), not only refers to a legal codification, but also was/is used regarding the first five books of the Bible, the Law of Moses: The Torah. Essentially, the Law, Torah is a narrative, beginning with a primeval history, then a patriarchal history, followed by those accounts associated with Moses and the exodus of the Chosen Tribes en route to The Land of Promise.
Given our present sermon series, I truly have been delighted to meditate afresh regarding the life-experience of Joseph; and so I invite you to meditate with me, “Expectations,” as based upon Genesis 41: 1-32. But first a question: What are your dreams like: your daydreams and your night dreams like?
Textual Reflections:
Our passage this morning is the further continuation of Joseph’s story. You will recall, and I beg your indulgence: at age 17, whether genuinely naïve or genuinely antagonistic, Joseph shared with his family two dreams, which kindled his brothers’ hatred and his father’s censure—and led to his being sold into slavery and purchased by the Egyptian, Potiphar. Once within Potiphar’s household, Joseph excelled, finding favor in Potiphar’s eyes, even as we repeatedly read, “the LORD was with Joseph.” However, Joseph also found favor in the eyes of Potiphar’s wife, which led to his imprisonment. Here too the LORD was with Joseph, so that once again he excelled, his apparent administrative and/or leadership gifts fully operative. His resume now read: Successfully managed large Egyptian household and estate; ably supervised and administered personnel within Egyptian correctional institution; now seeking more fulfilling employment.
In the course of his correctional responsibilities, Joseph inquired of and listened to two recently incarcerated detainees: Pharaoh’s cupbearer and baker. Each had a disturbing dream, which Joseph correctly interpreted—with the plea to the cupbearer that he might help secure Joseph’s release. Having obtained his freedom and Pharaoh’s favor, however, the cupbearer failed to remember Joseph, who suffered two more years of forsaken abandonment.
But after those two years, and now our text, Pharaoh had two disturbing dreams, which his magicians and wise men failed to interpret. At this moment in our narrative, however, the cupbearer remembered Joseph, whereby Pharaoh sent for Joseph. As he stood before him, freshly shaven and clean, verse 16, essentially Pharaoh asked of Joseph: “Can you interpret my dream (חֲלֽוֹם)?” to which Joseph answered: “It is not in me to say; God will answer Pharaoh peace (אֶת־שְׁל֥וֹם).” Pharaoh (and now for the second time in our text) then recounted his dreams, but upon this occasion inserting greater, more vivid detail: the cows were fatter and sleeker, or more ugly and scrawny; the grain more abundant or thinner and scorched. Joseph listened, and then provided that interpretation we know so well: seven years of feast followed by seven years of famine.
Application:
As I initially pondered this morning’s passage, I was struck afresh by Joseph’s forthright honesty, both about himself and his LORD’s sovereignty; and yet, I found my heart and mind turning to the reality of dreams: Joseph’s dreams, the cupbearer’s and baker’s dreams, and Pharaoh’s dreams. With all four individuals, they implicitly assumed that dreams were a medium of communication. They believed that their dreams contained divine messages.
As a child of the Enlightenment, as one impacted by Western, Freudian psychology, I too believe that dreams contain a message, but fundamentally about “the self,” and that my dreams are fundamentally about me. These days not frequently, but there was a time, when well beyond academia, I had a recurring dream: I was seated in a calculus class, a class I had never attended, and had just been handed the final exam (and I’ve never had calculus in my life), and the result of the exam was certain: absolute failure. Upon awakening from this dream and its various iterations, I eventually learned to ask: “Okay, Stan, what are you presently facing, that you fear means absolute failure?”
Often this question was very helpful to me; but as I have recently pondered Joseph’s experience, I was arrested by this obvious observation: Joseph and those about him believed that dreams were a form of God’s communication to and with them. This observation then led me to ask: Just how do I expect the Creator of the universe to communicate to me? In response to this question, I was first reminded of Joan of Arc: in his play, Joan of Arc, George Bernard Shaw, who was hardly a protagonist of the Christian faith, had Joan, upon being accused of madness because she claimed to hear God speak to her, in essence state, Well, how else to you expect God to communicate to me except through my mind …? How else? And then my mind turned to that wonderful insight of C.S. Lewis: “God whispers to us in our pleasures,” he noted, “speaks to us in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It [pain] is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
I wonder this morning: How do you expect the God of creation to communicate with/to you? Or even: Do you have any expectations at all that He might seek a word with you? Admittedly, I’m not advocating that you begin looking to your dreams, or the dreams of any other, as a “word from the LORD” (Jerry warranted me about propagating heresy), and yet, I ask again: Do you expect our LORD to communicate with you—and if so, how? By a bumper sticker? a text? a song lyric? a child’s comment? the Scriptures? closeted prayer? I am one who strongly advocates the importance, the discipline of daily Scripture meditation and prayer—but even with such a discipline, I recognize in my own life that too often I don’t really expect “to receive a word from the Lord.”
Returning to C.S. Lewis: may you and I not fall subject to only hearing our Lord through the megaphone of pain. Rather, may hear Him speak and whisper to us in any form that might accommodate our limitations. What do you expect? Are you listening—for in truth, the Word became flesh and is alive, actively communicating among us.