Genesis 37:3-8, 17b-22, 26-34; 50:15-21 & Luke 6:32-36 on September 22nd, 2024
Above is audio of the sermon pulled from the video and amplified.
Below is transcript pulled from the video and formatted by artificial intelligence. There may be inconsistencies or errors.
Grace, a mercy and peace to you in the name of our Lord, our Savior, Jesus the Christ, amen.
I mentioned I had three brothers. Brother number one was born right after World War II. Dad had come home from service in the South Pacific. He and Mom married started a home and within a year, Herbert Victor Jr. was born, blonde hair, blue eyes, gorgeous baby, the prince. And he lived that way for at least two and a half years. And then he heard there was a baby on the way. And he got very excited about this baby. And he talked about it and he waited for it. And the day came when Dad and Mom brought home the baby. And he was so disappointed because he was convinced it was going to be a baby horse. I never measured up from day one. And it was kind of a clouded relationship from that time on too. He was bigger, stronger. I was probably smaller but that much more annoying. And we just did this throughout life.
So I kind of get this story of Joseph and his brothers and some of the annoyance and some of the attitudes and some of the actions that took place. I mentioned earlier we are in a transitional Sunday here as we welcome back Pastor Jason. But we're also in a transitional Sunday because we're transitioning our stories in this narrative lectionary. Last week we had Abraham complaining to God that the promise still hadn't been realized that he was to have a child. And God says look at the stars who have descendants to number the stars.
Well now we're going a few generations. Abraham had the son. His name was Jacob. God also renamed him Israel. And he had many sons. In fact he had sons from different wives including his beloved wife who bore him the son Joseph. And how Jacob loved Joseph. And so much so that all of his step-brothers and even his baby brother realized they were second in line to Joseph. And they didn't much like it. They didn't much like the fact that Joseph had the special robe we call it the coat of many colors. It not only had many colors it had sleeves and it was a long coat. Now you and I might miss the significance of that. But if you're working in the fields you don't have sleeves you don't have a long coat and cumbering you. You have a short kind of a vest so that you can be free to move. Right there Jacob is telling the family I don't expect Joseph's ever going to have to work.
And then Joseph who's a dreamer has this ridiculous dream about seeing all the sheaths in the dream he is working in that long and sleeved coat. And his sheath stands straight and all the sheaths of the brothers bow down to him. Joseph couldn't have been too smart a guy because he gives that dream interpretation to his brothers. To naive to realize maybe that wouldn't go over too well. What do you mean we're going to bow down to you? Who is this kid? This 17 year old who is coming at us and telling us we will bow down to him.
So you can understand why the brothers plot with each other. We've got to get rid of the annoyance. We've got to stop it. It's hardly different today when there are people who annoy us, who bother us, who threaten us in our well-being. We want to stop them. We want to destroy them. Maybe we want to destroy their reputations. So we gossip. We say things online that we should never say and on and on it goes. We get this as the brothers plot to kill Joseph. But Rubin steps up and says, no, no, I don't think that's a good idea. I think just put him in a pit. Put him in a pit and maybe some animals will devour him or something. His plan is he's going to go to the pit later and save this brother. So they put Joseph in the pit. And while he's in the pit, they see some traders passing by in a caravan. Next idea. Why would we just kill him or leave him to be devoured if we can make some money off of him? And the brothers take him out of the pit and they sell him into slavery. What a family. But don't we also exploit one another in order to have it our way? Aren't there others who suffer?
Now what we don't hear in our reading this morning because we jump from chapter 37 to 50, but you can read that in less than a day if you'd like to go home and pick up Genesis. What we don't hear is that Joseph is carried away and employed in the household of kind of a medium size bureaucrat. The brothers in the meantime, they've taken that robe that was his. They've poured blood on it, shredded a little bit, taken it to Jacob and saying, this is all we found. I've never lost a child. I can't imagine what Jacob was feeling. And the brothers who watched him tear his clothing and weep had to live with the guilt year after year after year that they put their father in that sort of grief. Remember that it comes back at the end of the story.
Joseph in the meantime is proving himself to be charming. A good manager, he's given supervisory privileges in the household. And the wife of his master takes note and says, hmm Joseph looking good and tries to seduce him. And Joseph doesn't fall for the bait. He is an honorable man. That sets her off a little bit. Now she's angry with him. Makes accusations that, oh yes, he did assault me. He's thrown into prison. This Joseph guy doesn't really have good karma. Event after event after event, he's suffering. He's in prison and remember he's a dreamer and he interprets dreams. He interprets the dreams of his fellow prisoners, one of which is released, goes back to the Pharaoh.
Now the Pharaohs had this stream. It's a strange dream. It's got fat cows and skinny cows. The skinny cows are devouring the fat cows because they're so hungry. What is that about? What does it mean? And Joseph interprets the dream. Right now during these wonderful harvest, we have ample. We have more than enough. We should be storing it away. Because the time is coming when we will have a famine, when the crops will fail, when we will need to go to the warehouses for our daily bread, where others may come to us asking for supplies. The Pharaoh follows Joseph's interpretation and advice.
I like to think of my life. I have fat cow years and skinny cow years. I have those years where there are ample blessings. Store them up because there will be those other years when like Joseph, you think it's one thing after another that lands you in trouble. And you need to remember the promise and you need to feast on what is stored up. It makes good sense.
And so when the famine does strike Egypt, they are prepared. And the Pharaoh, seeing Joseph's wisdom, honors him with a position that's really second in command. He is the one who is going to be the gatekeeper and allow people to have the stockpiled food. So who comes calling? Because that famine is not just Egypt. It is the whole area, including Cana. And Jacob and his family are starving. And Jacob sends his sons to go to Egypt and bring back food. And the sons do that, not realizing that the one they stand before asking for that food is the very brother they sold into slavery.
Joseph recognizes them. He could have said no. He could have had the brothers arrested for their crimes. Instead, he gives them food. He doesn't even take their money. He returns their money. He sends them back to Jacob. And he waits until his younger brother, Benjamin, until his father, until those loved ones that were separated from him, not by his own will or intention, could be reunited with him again. And the brothers return. And Jacob is there. And there's weeping, as you can imagine, at such a reunion. And Jacob's family is welcomed into Egypt.
This is the transition now. Not only does Abraham have many kids, but those kids somehow end up in Egypt where in time they will be enslaved, in time. Not yet. Right now they're making their home there because Joseph has invited them in to enjoy everything the Egyptians have in plenty. It's a good story, but it's not over. It picks up now with where we go in the rest of today's reading.
Jacob has died. And the brothers now are a little bit fearful. Maybe Joseph was just holding it together and not hurting us because he didn't want our father to go through grief, the way we put our father through grief. But now that our father is dead, who's to keep Joseph from imprisoning us? It's a very real story. Doesn't this hit threads of your own life or how you have observed the world? Nothing has changed. And the brothers come and they throw themselves down before Joseph begging his mercy. The sheaves are bowed down before the one sheath that is Joseph. But he raises them up. They'll be none of that. You intended it to be evil, but God has been able to take that evil and make it good.
Now I want to point out that God did not design that story to happen. God did not make the brothers hate Joseph so that we get a wonderful Bible study out of it. God simply was with Joseph through all the evil and all the pain to make good. Because as much as Joseph is a dreamer and a good interpreter of dreams, the real dreamer in this story is God. God had a dream a couple of weeks ago when we talked about creation. God had a dream for the garden where all was made good and all were to live in harmony. God had a dream for the human beings that were made just a little less than angels that they would not only have the management of the garden, but they would serve the garden. They would lovingly care for the garden, for the world and for one another. God had a dream that we would live lifting one another up. Not tearing one another down.
When you look at this transitional story, you will see the reason later on, God gives the Ten Commandments because it has it all. It has murder. It has theft. It has bearing false witness. It has adultery. And it certainly has coveting. All those things that still make up our fall into sin, God will address with the Ten Commandments. But God's dream is greater than just keeping commandments. God's dream is for us to love and benefit one another the way God loves and benefits us. Joseph welcomes his brothers, holds no grudge, gives them the food, offers them a home in a foreign land.
I have to share one story because it has just been placed on my heart these last few weeks. My last parish had a relationship with the village of Hope in Haiti. That was an outgrowth of a project called Lazarus Project, this poor country of Haiti, like the beggar Lazarus at the door of the rich man, is just miles off of the U.S. coast. We have this relationship. I was able to go to Haiti and see poverty like we can't imagine. We may see homeless people, but we don't know what it is to be in a land where the resources were long ago exploited. The rich continued to get rich, but the poor continued to be exploited and suffer. I was in a truck passing children and they're begging for food. The one word they knew in English. It didn't matter if we only had a little plastic box of tic-tacs. If we threw that out of the truck, the children would run for it and grab it because that was something they can eat. I didn't see it. Another pastor told me about his encounter with the woman who made mud pies. She wasn't playing with her children. She had nothing to feed her children, so she took the dirt and hoped there would be some nutrients in the dirt and let these cakes bake in the sun and gave them to her children to eat.
When we read Bible stories to talk about famines, we might feel the gnawing sense of what it is to hunger, but we don't know famine. We don't know the hunger that so much of our world knows. So if people are able to come to this land as they went to Egypt in the story, God has a dream and the dream is they will be welcomed and they will be fed and they will be uplifted and they will be helped. I believe it. The Bible tells me so.
You see that dream that was God's was placed on Joseph's heart. It was in his heart when he was in the pit. It was in his heart when he was in the prison. It was in his heart when he sat in the seed of high government. It was in his heart as he welcomed his family. It is the dream of God and it's in your heart and my heart too. We have the dream. We have the same spirit helping us to live the dream. It's not just a cute transitional story. It is God's story that calls us and folds us into it this morning. It gives a new definition to what we say, living the life and living the dream here in Myrtle Beach. You and I live the life that God has given us. You and I are called to live the dream that God has for this world. We give thanks that we do it individually. We give thanks that as St. Philip's Lutheran Church, we are called to do it as our mission corporately. We give thanks for Pastor Jason being here to lead us forward.
God who intends all things turn out good. Go with us. Amen.