So, here we are again at another sermon. Seems like the week just flew by. And, once again, I am drawn into the narrative from the Hebrew Bible. There were so many ways I could have taken this passage. And if I could only get the music from "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" out of my head now...
Pace e bene,
Gerry
Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28
Don’t you hate it when a good story gets cut off mid-narrative? There you are, on the edge of your seat, ready to find out what happens next. The tension is building. The hero or heroine is in a fix. Will he or she get out of it? How will she do it? Does he have a chance?
And then, it’s over. Well, not exactly over, but it’s finished for the time being. Come back next week to find out if Pauline gets off the railroad tracks before the train comes along in the old movies. Stay tuned tomorrow to know if Wilma’s amnesia will prevent her from recognizing Rocco and pinning the murder of her half-sister, Giselda, on him or will he convince her to marry him, in a modern-day tv soap opera. Just when you’re salivating for the denouement, just as you’re ready for some release from the stress of not knowing what comes next, just when you think you’ve figured it out, then, wham, whoever is telling the story stops, leaving you cold. Of course, on tv and in the movies, it’s to get you coming back.
But you’d think whoever puts the lectionary together would be nicer, don’t you? They put these readings together for us to follow every week; a scripture from the Hebrew Bible, a Psalm, a reading from the letters and other books at the back of the Christian Testament and a Gospel reading. If you pay attention, you might notice that sometimes the readings flow from one into another; where this week’s reading leaves off, next week’s often picks up.
But one has to wonder what that group of scholars (or whoever puts together the lectionary readings) was thinking when they selected the verses from Genesis that we heard this morning. Was there some glee in their band knowing that the story we were to hear would be just like those early “Perils of Pauline?” Did they envision us sitting here and thinking, “what happens next?!?” Did they know that we would be on the edges of our seats wondering about poor Joseph?
Now, we do have to give them some leeway, those constructors of the lectionary. They do have a tremendous job to do. They have three years to the cycle of scripture readings. That’s it. And then it goes back and repeats itself. So that’s 156 Sundays they’ve got to work with. There’s no way they’re going to cover the entire Hebrew Bible in 156 readings. Not without enormously long readings on some Sundays. So stories do have to be broken up. Parts of stories and entire sections have to be, and are, left out. For instance, even in today’s reading, we skipped eight entire verses. But we’ll get to that in a minute.
But they did leave us hanging in this narrative at the end. What’s with that? We remember Jacob, perhaps, from last week’s reading. He was the wrestler we heard about. Well, now time has passed and Jacob, also known as Israel, is enjoying his family. And we meet Joseph, one of Jacob’s sons. But not just any old son; his favorite son. Out of the dozen sons Jacob fathered along the way (of course, the daughters don’t really count), Joseph stood out in his father’s eyes.
Now, I am not a father and am therefore wary about giving advice in regards to parenting, but… Well, let me ask you, those of you who are parents: even if you have a favorite offspring; even if you realize that fact that out of the two to how many ever children you have one of them has a most specialest place in your heart; do you tell your special one, that paragon of offspringdom, that he or she has attained that ‘most favored’ status in your life? And, not only that, do you tell this golden child’s siblings that they’re second rate? That they are all well and good as offspring go, but really, they just don’t stack up when measured against you-know-who? And furthermore, do you show your deeper love, affection and admiration for this special child by purchasing showy and expensive garments, which will proclaim to all the world the favored status of said progeny? Well, do you? I thought not.
Joseph was indeed Jacob’s favored one. Joseph’s brothers, who seemed to be a difficult lot to deal with in the first place, did not like this fact, it appears. Joseph, as we know not only from the Bible, but also from musical theater (so it must be true) was given by his Dad a beautiful coat; a multi-colored coat, if one pays attention to Andrew Lloyd-Weber and Tim Rice; an embroidered robe, with sleeves even. It was the fashion talk of all around those parts for a time there.
Now it wasn’t just the coat or the ‘favorite son’ status that were a problem. In the verses that we didn’t hear this morning is a recounting of how Joseph kept having dreams. He’d have these dreams and then describe them to the whole family. That doesn’t sound so bad in and of itself, but Joseph’s dreams didn’t help family harmony. Because he kept dreaming, in these fantastic metaphors involving wheat sheaves and astral bodies, that his brothers were going to bow down to him and pay him homage. And Joseph, apparently, did not hesitate to recount his dreamtime superiority. Right, just what a jealous sibling wants to hear from this coat-wearing, Dad-favored brother.
Is it any wonder then that this band of brothers decided that they had had quite enough of this berobed dreamer? Sibling or no, they began to plot. And just about that time, unwitting Dad sends Joseph off to the back forty to help these brothers with the sheep. Yep, Jacob unknowingly provides the initial tension for our story.
Of course, we heard what happened when Joseph got there. Fortunately, Reuben, the eldest brother, seemed to have some heart because he convinced his brothers not to kill Joseph on the spot. Instead, they tossed this 17-year old dreamer down a dry cistern while they figured out what to do and went back to eating dinner.
And then, watching some Ishmaelites, one of the tribes in that region, wander by with their camels in tow, someone in this fraternal company realized that there just might be money to be made in this situation. Ah, greed; always a good element to add to a story because every hearer can identify with it. Sure, we feel sorry for our hero, Joseph, and can imagine him down at the bottom of that well without food and drink, wondering what good the dreams he’s had are and what is going to get him out of this predicament, chilled to the bone because they’ve taken his coat from him and far from the protective sphere of his father. But the desire for some silver; for some shekels; some drachmas; for some rubles, rials or rupees; for some cold, hard cash; that desire, even yearning, is known, recognized and understood across time, culture and geography. Greed is something we all experience and is truly a universal language.
So for twenty shiny pieces of silver, the brothers get rid of the dreamer who has plagued them and who has stolen the affection from their father that was, after all, rightfully theirs. We can see them counting it over and over and dividing it up amongst themselves, as Joseph is led off to Egypt.
And that, right there, at that one suspense-filled moment in ancient near eastern history, is where they leave us. Oh great. You know it can’t be the end of the tale. You can tell that there is more to Joseph’s story, even if you haven’t seen Donnie Osmond capering about on stage, even if you haven’t read Genesis before. Because stories just don’t go like that. Every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Even the most novice of writers and storytellers knows that. And we can tell that this story, the one we heard today, is clearly not at the end.
And we don’t like that, do we? We like endings and we prefer happy endings. We’re accustomed to happy endings, or at the very least endings with all the loose threads tied up. Not a story in which the guy we’re rooting for, even with all his faults, this dreamer is enroute to…to…to what? Egypt, that much we know. And right now, that’s all we know.
But how are we to make a moral out of half a story? All good stories have morals—some message that rewards us for at least sitting through the telling of the story. Right? But with half a story, in which the hero seems defeated and evil appears to have triumphed, what’s the point? I ask you, what indeed is the point?
Well, the point is that this is half the story. It’s not over yet. I’m not going to tell you how it does come out and what Joseph has to go through to get there. Some of you probably know already anyway. If you don’t, you’ll have to pick up a Bible and pick up where we left off this morning.
But here we are in the middle of Joseph’s story and we have to make some sense out of it, don’t we? And here we are in the middle of each of our stories and we have to make some sense out of it, don’t we? Because our stories aren’t done. Our stories aren’t over yet. Like Joseph, we’re wanderers and dreamers. We’ll end up, who knows where and who knows how. We’ll be tossed in pits and we’ll be betrayed by people we think we can trust and greed is going to enter in somehow and affect us.
But we don’t know the end of the story…not yet, not now. And we have to live with that. We have to deal with the uncertainties of life and just when we’re wandering around admiring our new apparel that shows how loved we are and dreaming of a bright future, we find ourselves in a pit or tied to a camel or learning that we’re worth a few pieces of silver.
You know, someone else in this Bible of ours ended up being traded in for a few pieces of silver. Circumstances were different from this narrative about Joseph and his brothers, but the two stories are not that far off from each other really. In both, someone trusted got paid to sell someone else out. Of course, I’m talking about Jesus and the money that Judas received for turning him over to the authorities. And that story, well, that story we do know the ending. We know that Jesus was killed but that the resurrection brought him back and that he lives and lives and lives. In fact, he lives in each of us, in our half-stories so far and in our futures yet to come.
And that is what makes sense out of our stories to date; incomplete though they may be. This Jesus, whom we find living out our stories for us, invites us into eternal life with him. It doesn’t matter where we are in our stories, we do know the ending. Unlike poor, young, frightened, powerless Joseph, tethered to some Ishmaelite’s camel headed east, we can see ahead and know some peace. Our God lives in and through us and will continue to do so, long after our stories have indeed ended.
Sermon for 3 August 2008
It's been a while since I've posted a sermon because our church has had a discussion series over the past few months and I haven't had to write one since April. But I'm back in the saddle again.
The image to the left is a picture I took at the Tate Gallery in London a few years ago. It is Jacob and the Angel by Jacob Epstein and is based in the scripture reading.
Blessings,
Gerry
Genesis 32:22-31
I remember a conversation I had that goes back to high school, which is a very long time ago now, as you know. I was talking with my usual group of friends, four of us who hung out together a lot, and Barb Lynch, in response to who-knows-what, said “Whenever I’m angry, I yell at God. I know he’ll understand.”
Now my little quartet of friends was a somewhat religious group I do admit. All of us were active in church and we were at the edge of that era when faith was an unstated assumption. Of the four of us though, I was the only Protestant. The other three, Barb, Maureen and Bill, were all active in the local Roman Catholic parish, singing in the folk group that was going at the time and sundry other churchy pursuits. I must admit that this young Presbyterian (at the time) was a little jealous of all that these friends of mine were doing in their church. This was small-town Pennsylvania and I had few, if any, Presbyterian friends at my church.
I don’t recall a lot of religious or faith conversations among Barb, Maureen, Bill and me in high school. So this memorable statement on Barb’s part seems a little surprising, but maybe that’s why I remember it so clearly. Or perhaps, she hit on a theme that speaks a truth; a truth that goes back for centuries, even through the ages to the time of our Genesis reading this morning. Maybe it’s that truth that has haunted humanity from Jacob right up to Barb Lynch and beyond that stays with me.
Barb’s words shocked me that day. I never thought, as a good, half-German, grandson of a minister, Protestant boy that you should or could yell at God. Ever. That was a preposterous notion! God was to be revered. God was to be prayed to. God was worshipped. God was…well, God simply was. God was out there somewhere. We had a nice polite relationship, God and me. I would no more yell at God than I would yell at my grandmother, for crying out loud! It just wasn’t done.
But here’s this friend of mine, someone I like and respect and spend lots of time with, saying she does just that. Now there was the fact that to me at the time, her religious practices, as well as Bill’s and Maureen’s, were somewhat exotic. She was Catholic. My goodness. In a school system that had one, that I recall, Jewish family, to me Catholics were indeed exotic and mysterious.
Did that explain this “yelling at God” business—her exotic faith? Perhaps that was a part of it, but I doubt that it was the whole of it to me at the time. Because something about her statement stuck with me, obviously, across the decades since we all were sent out into the world by the Dallas School District. It remained in my accessible memory, dredged up every few years as my own faith grew and changed and matured; remembered when something inside me clicked just right.
You don’t yell at God, I thought at the time. And neither do you wrestle with God. You just accept God as God is. Right? Again, I would no more wrestle with God than I would with either of my grandmothers. But now….? Well, I still wouldn’t wrestle or yell at either of my grandmothers, neither of whom are with us any longer. But God, well, God is definitely a different story now.
I’d say that in the years that have passed from my high school days, our relationship, God’s and mine, has changed, helped, no doubt, by Barb’s insight. But I changed too and part of that process of changing opened me up to the possibilities of not treating God as a porcelain cup on a shelf or a likeable but distant acquaintance.
Because I did, as you know, eventually leave the safe confines of Northeastern Pennsylvania and ventured out into the world. And little by little, I started noticing things around me. Some of it, like we explored in our worship service last week, was beautiful. I knew where God was in all of that; God created beauty. God was in the flowers and the trees and the birds and all of that.
But I began noticing other things too. The Vietnam War, which took the life of one of my cousins, had ended while I was in high school and the questions about it, and war in general, still swirled around and in me. People you cared about could be addicted, I found out. As I grew, society changed. Suddenly, it seems, the fact that everyone had a home and a place to live was not a given anymore. Difference in race in our culture did make a difference, not just a difference, but a discrepancy and racism not only existed, it affected and infected everything. (Beside the one Jewish family that I remember, my school district, at that time, had one African-American family. I did indeed have much to learn and discover.)
So where, I began to ponder, is God in all of that? If God is all-knowing (if I can see these things, certainly God must be able to do so) and all-powerful (if God can create the universe, certainly God could do something about the state of affairs I found around me), why doesn’t God do something? “Why don’t you do something???!!!”
Indeed, Barb had unknowingly provided that chink in the faith armor, which I had built up, that allowed me finally to yell at and wrestle with God. There was no moment that I can recall in which a light bulb went on and I thought, “hey, I can yell;” “I can wrestle.” But it was more like a realization of a memory that that’s exactly what I had been doing.
Jacob, you know, was no paragon of virtue. He scammed his brother Esau and plotted with his mother against his father and brother. He was such a lowlife that he had to hightail it out of the homeland to his mother’s kin for fear of his life at one point. There he acquired two wives (granted, the account of that happening makes Jacob the victim) and had kids with the two maidservants mentioned in today’s reading. But he too evidently grew up some along the way. Because when we find him today, he’s on his way back home; back with his wives and concubines, with his kids and with all that he’s accumulated; back to face his brother who has really gotten a bad deal over the years from Jacob. He’s in, what one might call, transition and he’s nervous about this little family reunion that’s going to happen, with good reason. That’s where we find him in today’s account: on the road, wondering not if but how hard Esau is going to slug him on first sight.
The story is a little odd, I admit. It’s like there are details that we’re supposed to know already; some things that our culture doesn’t get that the original hearers of this tale would supply on their own. It might even be two separate tales smushed together. Who knows? But the lasting impression is indeed that Jacob, all alone, removed from the safety of family, wrestles. And the account leaves us feeling that it is God with whom Jacob wrestles.
Now, unless you’re a high school athlete or a professional actor, I mean, wrestler, you probably haven’t wrestled, physically wrestled, lately. But I bet that if each of us here thinks about it, we’ll all realize that we have done some wrestling in our time. We’ve struggled and twisted and turned and fought against some unknown opponent and then all of a sudden, it turns out to be God, we realize. We all know Jacob’s story, because, in many ways, we’ve lived it too. I bet each of us can think of a time that we have mightily wrestled with God. And you know what? That’s all right. We each can wrestle, in whatever way is necessary, wrestle with this God of ours. We can yell and question and challenge God. God can take it.
Now, I do admit, it can be scary, this wrestling-with-God thing. And it happens when we’re alone often. In fact, that may be what brings it on. But, like Jacob, we can face this elusive opponent and we can hold on; hold on for dear life and extract a blessing for all our struggles.
It’s somewhat unfortunate, but I’m no longer in touch with Barb Lynch. Like many friendships from the past eras of our lives, we move on and lose touch. Last I heard she was in North Carolina with a family. I wonder, though, from time to time, if indeed she is still yelling at God. I sure hope so.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
