Genesis 37 adapted from Eugene Peterson:
This is the story of Jacob. The story continues with Joseph, seventeen years old at the time, helping out his brothers in herding the flocks. These were his half brothers actually, the sons of his father’s wives Bilhah and Zilpah. And Joseph brought his father bad reports on them.
Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons becaue he was the child of his old age. And he made him an elaborately embroidered coat. When his brothers realized that their father loved him more than them, they grew to hate him – they wouldn’t even speak [a peaceable word] to him.
Joseph had a dream When he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more. He said, “Listen to this dream I had. We were all out in the field gathering bundles of wheat. All of a sudden my bundle stood straight up and your bundles circled around it and bowed down to mine.”
His brothers said, “So! You’re going to rule us? You’re going to boss us around?” And they hated him more than ever because of his dreams and the way he talked.
He had another dream and told this one also to his brothers: “I dreamed another dream – the sun and moon and eleven stars bowed down to me!”
When he told it to his father and brothers, his father reprimanded him: “What’s with all this dreaming? Am I and your mother and your brothers all supposed to bow down to you?” Now his brothers were really jealous; but his father brooded over the whole business.
His brothers had gone off to Shechem where they were pasturing their father’s flocks. Israel said to Joseph, “Your brothers are with flocks in Shechem. Come, I want to send you to them”
Joseph said, “I am ready.”
He said, “Go and see how your brothers and the flocks are doing, [see if there is peace with them,] and bring me back a report.
[When Joseph appeared on the horizon his brothers] spotted him off in the distance. By the time he got to them they had cooked up a plot to kill him. The brothers were saying, “Here comes that dreamer. Let’s kill him and throw him into one of these old cisterns; we can say that a vicious animal ate him up. We’ll see what his dreams amount to.”
Reuben heard the brothers talking and intervened to save him “We’re not going to kill him. No murder. Go ahead and throw him in this cistern out here in the wild, but don’t hurt him.” Reuben planned to go back later and get him out and take him back to his father.
When Joseph reached his brothers, they ripped off the fancy coat he was wearing, grabbed him, and threw him into a cistern. The cistern was dry; there wasn’t any water in it.
Then they sat down to eat their supper. Looking up, they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites on their way from Gilead, their camels loaded [with goods for use in medicine, cosmetics, and embalming] to sell in Egypt. Judah said, “Brothers, what are we going to get out of killing our brother and concealing the evidence? Let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites, but let’s not kill him – he is, after all, our brother, our own flesh and blood.” His brothers agreed.
…His brothers pulled Joseph out of the cistern and sold him for twenty pieces of silver to the Ishmaelites who took Joseph with them down to Egypt.
Later Reuben came back and went to he cistern – no Joseph! He ripped his clothes in despair. Beside himself, he went to his brothers. “The boy is gone!” What am I going to do!”
They took Joseph’s coat, butchered a goat, and dipped the coat in the blood. They took the fancy coat back to their father and said, “We found this. Look it over – do you think this is your son’s coat?”
He recognized it at once. “My son’s coat – a wild animal has eaten him. Joseph torn limb from limb!”
Jacob tore his clothes in grief, dressed in rough burlap, and mourned his son a long, long time. His sons and daughters tried to comfort him but he refused their comfort. “I’ll go to the grave mourning my son.” Oh, how his father wept for him.
In Egypt [Joseph was sold] to Potiphar, on of Pharaoh’s officials, manager of his household affairs.
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Today we continue our focus on the parents of our faith found in Genesis. Since the first week of July we’ve been considering the lives of Isaac, Rebecca, and their twin sons Jacob and Esau and what we can learn from these scriptures about human nature, and the nature of God. This is a family God chose in a special way and blessed with a covenant relationship. In exchange for worshipping the Lord and living according to God’s ways, God promised to bless this family by giving them a homeland, and a very large family. If you follow my suggestion to read up on these Genesis stories on your own, especially the ones we don’t get to on Sundays, you will find out how God’s grace was at work in Jacob’s life to produce twelve sons and a daughter. Finally this family was on it’s way to becoming as numerous as the stars of heaven. Last week we focused on the story of Jacob returning home to the Promised Land with his large family and all their wealth. So finally, it seems God’s promise is being fulfilled. But don’t get too comfortable, because in just a few short verses this family’s fortune reverses again and they experience life in the pit.
Though Jacob had wrestled with God and received a new identity as Israel, it would take a while for him and his family to live into the transformation God was working in them. Many of the same old troubles remained in this family. Like Abraham, Jacob has more than one wife, and he favors one over the other. Like Abraham and Isaac, Jacob also chooses to favor one son over his other children; causing jealousy and family discord. And the apple doesn’t fall far from the stem as the younger brother Joseph relates to his older siblings, constantly pushing to be first. Finally, like their father, Joseph’s brothers deceive Jacob, causing him great grief in the process.
Joseph was son number eleven. It’s not surprising that Jacob felt especially close to Joseph because he was the first-born child of Rachel, Jacob’s first love. I think it’s probably normal in a big family for each member to have favorite relatives. Having a special bond with one person in a family wasn’t really the problem. Jacob’s mistake was in showing his favoritism publicly by giving Joseph a special gift, a beautiful coat. Such an act could only stir up resentment in Jacob’s other children. And Joseph was not the least humble about his relationship to his dad, but acted as the bratty little brother, tattling on everyone else. The result – a relationship where there was no peace, no shalom, between Joseph and his brothers. The brothers grew to hate Joseph and wouldn’t even speak to him peaceably. In the end, thinking Joseph dead, even Jacob had no peace.
Now besides the coat Joseph had another gift, a God-given talent of being able to interpret dreams. In Genesis there are three times in Joseph’s life when Joseph interprets dreams with accuracy. But the way the young Joseph used this gift the first time, in a narrowly personal way, only poured salt on the wounded relationship between him and his brothers. His dream was that his bundle of wheat stood up in the center while the other bundles bowed to him, had truth in it. Joseph would later prove instrumental in preserving the lives of his family from a great famine. But interpreting this dream as though God ordained that his older brothers worship him was not kind or wise. It did not bring peace to his family and it provided fuel for his brothers’ resentment and anger.
Last week I spoke of the dark night of the soul, a term given to us by St. John of the Cross, to name the experience so many Christians have when things are just not going right in our lives. This week we can think of life in the pit as a similar experience. We feel stuck, abandoned, unloved by everyone, even God. While we can sometimes find ourselves in this pit of life through the actions of others, often we find that we contribute to our own misery. In Joseph’s case he wound up in the pit, not only because his father chose favorites and his brothers were jealous, but because of his own focus on himself. Joseph was prideful, haughty, a tattletale, a brat. And even though God gave him gifts he them with a focus only on himself.
This gives us reason for us to wonder, when we find ourselves in our own dark night of the soul. How might we ourselves be contributing to being there? How might we be misusing gifts from God in a way that blocks shalom? A key word in the scriptures today is the Hebrew word shalom. Shalom is a rich word, which sometimes means peace, but also means wholeness. When we sing It is Well with My Soul, we are singing about God’s shalom. It is a deep peace, where everyone has everything they need, and people actively share, and participate in God’s work of blessing the world around them. But it is clear from Genesis that there is no shalom between Joseph and his brothers. Remembering this, we can laugh at the irony when Jacob sends Joseph to find his brothers and learn if there is shalom with them. It is clear that everyone’s actions in this story further hinder shalom from growing among them. When we find ourselves in a dark night of the soul, when we experience life in the pit, it is often because our sin is somehow blocking God’s shalom.
My own childhood, though full of blessings, also contained much darkness, and looking back I can see how I, like Joseph, contributed to this experience by misusing a gift from God. In my case the gift was my faith. As I’ve mentioned in my little biographical statements, I was blessed by a family who nurtured me in the Christian faith from the time I was born. Not only did we participate regularly in church as a family including Sunday school, choir and youth group, but we also had bible stories at home and from my first allowance my parents taught me to tithe. My grandparents starting bringing me to Camp Farthest Out when I was five and we never missed a year. My faith gave me some measure of blessing in my life. But like Joseph, I looked at my gift in a narrowly personal way, which ended up being a barrier to shalom.
I mistakenly looked at faith as a very good thing that I did. I was well aware that not everyone worshipped God on Sundays, not everyone followed the Ten Commandments. And so I saw my gift of faith, not as a gift to be shared, but as a way to puff myself up and boss others around. I remember in fourth grade telling my classmates in school not to say “God” unless they were praying, for that was breaking the third commandment. A few years latter I felt inspired one night and wrote a new verse to the old song “One Little Candle” moralistically exhorting people that they should go to church every Sunday. To my shame, my parents and the Jr. choir director let me sing it in worship. As a teenager I embraced some of the ethics of the Christian faith in a way that really separated me from my peers, completely avoiding the normal stage of adolescent rebellion in high school. In all of these actions I was placing myself in the seat of the judge, thinking that I was a good sheep and they were the bad goats. I was just like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable, looking down on the tax collector thanking God “that I am not like other people.” As you might imagine, this way of “sharing” my faith with others did not lead to shalom, and did not win others to Christ. It only separated me from the kids around me, probably gave them a bad impression of the Church and made me very lonely. And it also adversely affected my relationship to God. Having to prove myself good all the time, meant I could not admit to my own sins, confess, or know the grace of forgiveness. My image of God was the eternal judge who I secretly feared would condemn me forever if I screwed up. So in the end, the way I was using my gift of faith prevented that gift from being used as a blessing of Shalom for others and even for myself.
But we can give thanks that our God does not leave us in the pits we dig for ourselves. Our Lord is called Emmanuel, God with us, and promises to be with us in the darkest night and the deepest well, to continue to bless us, and give us a way out. As we read through Genesis we see how God stayed with Joseph. When we get to chapter 40 we read of how God caused Joseph to be jailed with two other dreamers, and how he used his gift of interpreting dreams, not for his own benefit, but for their sakes. And by taking his eyes off of himself, Joseph was no longer blocking God’s shalom, but allowing it to flow. In chapter 41 we then read of how God makes it possible for Joseph to interpret the Pharaoh’s disturbing dreams and understand that the next seven years of plentiful harvest would be followed by seven years of famine. Josephs gift thus enabled Egypt to wisely bank up grain from the years of plenty and thus save not only their own people, but neighboring people, including Joseph’s own family from Canaan. Finally, Joseph had opened himself to the Spirit of God and had learned how to use his gift to bring God’s will, a life of shalom, to all around him.
When we find ourselves in the pit of life, we can, as people who trust God, hold fast to our faith that God’s has gifted us with everything we need to turn any evil situation into an experience of shalom. In fact, I suspect that most of us need a dark night of the soul, God’s version of time out, before we take a good look at ourselves and see how the inappropriate ways we are use our gifts in contributes to suffering in the world.
All of the gifts God gives to us are meant to add to shalom in the world. In several communities across the nation now, time banks have sprung up with the express purpose of helping people use their gifts to bless others, giving all a place to go when they, in turn, need help. Jon and his wife Doris came to time bank orientation to see what it was all about. Doris came to find a way to get Jon companionship for when she was out working. Jon has a disease that has caused him to be in a wheelchair. He spends his day at home alone. Doris was interested in finding ways that she could help others in order to earn hours so that Jon could receive companionship from others.
During the orientation, however, they learned that even as Doris could earn hours for Jon, he would also be able to earn his own hours. They were both a little surprised but went ahead with the enrollment for both of them and soon became very active.
Jon not only can finish any mailing job in record time, he also teaches piano, weeds by getting out of his wheel chair going from section to section in the garden on his hands and knees and provides entertainment for social events. He has also offered to help others rake leaves. All in all, Jon and Doris have a network that has helped them make connections that have been very beneficial to them and many others.
Time exchanges are not direct. Instead, the project promotes a circle of giving and receiving. Members ask for what they need – babysitting or pet sitting, music lessons, meal preparation, baking, sewing, an oil change and more – and return the favor with one from a similar list of services. Though focusing one’s gift to meet another’s need might seem sacrificial, it’s really a means to create shalom for everyone, because the giver is ensured of receiving what he or she needs too.
When the church is truly functioning as Jesus meant it to, it is like a time bank, with God at the center. At Camp Farthest Out we have a beautiful dance that shows God’s method of using us to spread gifts of shalom to the whole world. Though we can’t do the dance right now, I’d like you to imagine it. We are standing in a perfect circle, like the sheaves in Joseph’s dream, but the only one in the center of the circle is the Lord himself. We are facing the center of the circle, focused the throne of God. But we are also united with one another, by holding hands. Each of us carefully holds our left hand up, and or right hand down, so that everyone is both giving and receiving our gifts. As the music plays we gently sway from side to side, then we take slow steps toward the center, lifting our arms, and swaying from side to side in praise and adoration. In return for our worship of God, gifts are distributed to each one of us. Still facing the center, each one receives his or her gift, bringing arms down as we slowly take steps back out. Then when we are in place, each one of us turns individually in a complete circle, arms outstretched, to share our gifts for the shalom of the world. We repeat this pattern over and over, praising the Lord who gives every good gift, giving and receiving gifts from each other, and using them to bless all of creation. This is the way out of any pit we might find ourselves in; it is a life of true shalom. May it be so for us all.
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