Show Notes
Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28 | Psalm 105:1-6, 16-22, 45b | Romans 10:5-15 | Matthew 14:22-33
Chapters
- (00:00:00) - The Story of Joseph
- (00:05:10) - Joseph and the Families
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Amen.
[00:00:02] So I can't imagine a person in this chapel to whom the story of Joseph doesn't hit some nerve. Which, by the way, I'm a total Old Testament junkie, so you're probably going to hear. And it's great stories for the next few weeks.
[00:00:19] So this story of Joseph actually going all the way back to Abraham is really the original soap opera.
[00:00:28] And it has elements of family truth that hit a nerve, I would imagine, for most of us, somewhere along the line, Joseph is the firstborn of his father's favorite wife and the next to last out of the 12 of Israel.
[00:00:45] And Joseph, in his father's eyes, he can do no wrong. He's the favorite son. And as one commentator I read said Joseph's father, Jacob, went to Nordstrom to buy Joseph clothes, but everybody else got Target.
[00:01:01] And Joseph, the reading today actually cuts out. Joseph's one of the best parts of this. Joseph has these dreams that he's better than his brothers, right? He's number 11 out of 12. And he comes and he tells his brothers, oh, I had this dream and you all. And everybody bowed down to me, right?
[00:01:20] You can only imagine how well that strengthened these sibling relationships down the road.
[00:01:27] So Jacob sends Joseph off to go find his. Oh, I'm sorry.
[00:01:34] Jacob sends Joseph off in his very fine robe to go find his brothers who are out tending the sheep. And the brothers have supposedly been in Shechem. And you're going to say, all right, just another name in the Bible. Only Shechem is where the brothers sought revenge for their sister who. Who had been treated inappropriately by the men of Aman and Shechem. So not exactly the safest place to be sending yourself off to. But off he goes to Shechem to go find his brothers, but this random man tells him, no, they've moved on to Dothan, which is a clue.
[00:02:16] Joseph's brothers have not kept him in the loop. They are not telling him what's going on. He has no clue.
[00:02:24] So Joseph goes along to find his brothers, and of course, they are none too happy because these dreams that got cut out of the reading, the dreams were supposed to be portents of the future, but they only were portents if the person who drained them was alive.
[00:02:44] So if Joseph is killed, well, then they don't have to worry about him and his power.
[00:02:51] But it gets better, because Reuben, the eldest, I mean, who's gonna be most upset that the number 11 is the favorite child, number one?
[00:03:02] And don't eldest always have their own plan? I mean, really Right. So Reuben has a side plan. So the brothers are all like, look, if we kill him, then we don't have to worry about him. But Reuben is like, yeah, yeah, let's do that. Let's put him in this hole over here. Because Reuben can then run home and tell his father where Joseph is and become the hero of the entire story.
[00:03:29] So we have the plot, and then we have the subplot, and it's all going on at once.
[00:03:35] So the brothers strip Joseph of his beautiful robe. So they throw him into the pit with no water. And Reuben is all ready to put his plan into action. But then one of the brothers says, you want to know? It might not be so great to kill him. Why don't we just sell him off to the slave traders and make some money on the deal?
[00:03:56] And that's what happens. Now, side point, because you aren't going to get the whole story. The brothers then go tell their dad that Joseph got eaten by wild animals. And they pour goat's blood all over his robe and show it to dad as proof. But just so you know, our reading ends today.
[00:04:15] And it is great drama. I mean, we love drama, don't we?
[00:04:20] In essence, isn't that why we read books and we go to movies and we, you know, watch everything on our feeds is because we kind of like the story?
[00:04:31] It's why I read scripture sometimes. Great drama in there.
[00:04:36] Joseph gets sold off.
[00:04:38] The brothers realize they need to tell Jacob the father, what happened, so they do the whole trick. Now, the funny thing about them tricking their dad, who's the original trickster in the Old Testament? Their father, Jacob. Right. So Jacob is king of trying to fool everybody. Got taken by his youngest daughter. But then the brothers come and fool him.
[00:05:02] And oddly enough, it causes him great grief.
[00:05:06] The cost of trickery.
[00:05:10] And there are many elements in the story that fascinate me, as you can tell. But there are two that I want to talk about today.
[00:05:18] One is Joseph is an object in this story.
[00:05:23] But we don't hear much about what he thinks.
[00:05:26] We hear what the brothers think. We hear what Reuben thinks, but we don't hear from Joseph at all.
[00:05:34] Did he struggle?
[00:05:36] Did he call his brothers names from the pit while they sat around and had a meal? While he was imprisoned?
[00:05:45] What did he look like when they bound him to camels and walked him away from his family?
[00:05:52] Did Joseph's faith waver?
[00:05:56] And he had faith, we know, because of these dreams.
[00:06:01] Was it a problem?
[00:06:04] Did he doubt his family and what it meant to be family when his old blood, own blood sold him off.
[00:06:12] I wonder about Joseph. I wonder about how he kept his faith so strong given the twists and turns of his life.
[00:06:21] One day you're parading around in your finery and the next you have been sold off into slavery.
[00:06:30] So next week we will pick up the story so far down the line and I do this all the time at home.
[00:06:37] You have to go home and find your Bible. Do you know where your Bibles are?
[00:06:42] Right? Or it's on your phone now. Super handy.
[00:06:46] Go home and read Genesis 37:45. It's not that long and it's great story and it'll catch you up if you're going to be here next week because you don't want to miss all the good stuff in between. And there is some really good stuff.
[00:07:00] So if you are an Old Testament geek like me, you will realize and you've been coming to church for the past few weeks, you will realize that there is a shift in this story than ones that we have been hearing throughout this summer or just in general. In the Old Testament you see Abraham, who it all starts with, he had angels come and visit him telling him that he and Sarah would bear many children. Isaac witnessed firsthand God's saving grace on the day that his father saved him from being sacrificed. Jacob, Isaac's son, wrestles with an angel, gets his hip, put out a joint, finally being blessed and is given the name Israel. So all the way through, God has shown up. It's called a theophany when you're face to face with God.
[00:07:54] God has shown up physically present. But with Joseph, God is gone, but not gone.
[00:08:04] God does not appear in this way.
[00:08:07] And so it becomes the start of us understanding God in a new and a different fashion.
[00:08:15] It's why I find the Joseph story so poignant because it reaches into our hearts and our lives and it asks us what do we do with our faith when we don't have God showing up face to face.
[00:08:31] And Joseph, his experience is so much like ours.
[00:08:35] Families.
[00:08:37] Families who we love. Families who we sometimes don't like so much.
[00:08:42] There's treachery and deception and greed and power and grief and then there's love and gift and compassion and help and trust and forgiveness which comes way down the line.
[00:09:00] But throughout all of this, God is there.
[00:09:05] I know and you know that God was right there with Joseph and his brothers. As the plan worked out, as life continued in captivity and living in a lie, the generation of descendants of Abraham's had lived in faith from Joseph on Down through Peter, who we see in today's gospel. And it comes down, this faith into us.
[00:09:37] We live lives of faith despite the fact that God has not shown up to us to as an angel or a pillar of cloud.
[00:09:47] And yet we strive to live our lives knowing not just live them, but to live them as we know that God is there with us.
[00:09:59] God is with us when we are in the pit.
[00:10:02] God is with us when we are sinking in the waters like Peter.
[00:10:07] And God is with us even when we don't see God right in front of us.
[00:10:13] God was there with Joseph.
[00:10:16] God is here with us now.
[00:10:21] And Joseph makes the example that we can't make a corollary between the events in our lives and God's presence.
[00:10:31] The challenges that life throws at us is not.
[00:10:36] Not reflective God being with us.
[00:10:39] Rather, how we navigate those challenges is where God shows up next to us and it's where we proclaim our faith.
[00:10:49] If we spend our time wondering why God allowed something to happen to us, then we get stalled in the mess and we don't actually move forward, which is what we are called to do. It's what Joseph did. He didn't like slavery, and yet he moved forward with God's help.
[00:11:08] With God's help.
[00:11:10] The very words that we say at our baptism and a reminder that all that we do, we do with God's help.
[00:11:19] And so when our families, our personal families, our church families, our work families, our circle of friend families, when they have their moments of treachery, when the deception gets confusing and you can't remember who said what to whom and when, when the greed of your sibling is ready to drive you up the wall, or when arguments over power of attorney get heated, when the grief of the death of a family member strikes, we can choose to reach out to God and to rely on our faith.
[00:11:56] We can be like Joseph and know that God is with us now and always. No matter what, no matter how we are treated, Our faith gives us the gift to accept our situation and to decide how we respond with love. How we can use our gifts to get ourselves out of the pit, how we can use compassion even when we are at the end of our rope. And how we can help others when we too are in need.
[00:12:26] Faith is what takes us out of the pit.
[00:12:29] It is what allows us, like Joseph, to continue faithfully forward in our lives.
[00:12:36] Amen.
