Hilton Head Island, SC – February 18, 2085
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 41:53-42:5; 45:1-11
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “So it was not you who sent me here, but God; and he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt.” Genesis 45:8 (RSV)
All four of the great patriarchs of Genesis have fascinating stories associated with them, but Joseph’s story is the most amazing of all. Perhaps more intriguing things are said about Joseph than about his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather put together.
Here, with no explanation about anything are some of those factors. Joseph’s mother, Rachel, was the favorite wife of Jacob, Joseph’s father. Rachel’s first of two sons, Joseph, was her favorite child. Rachel had only two sons, dying in childbirth with the second son, Benjamin. Joseph was also the favorite son of Jacob. In Genesis, there were a lot of favorite children, which religiously and psychologically is probably in general a bad idea. Joseph was a prolific dreamer of dreams, and in one of his dreams, he was a Very Big Kahuna, and his brothers all bowed down to him, even though Joseph was the eleventh of twelve brothers. His brothers were not at all pleased to hear about his dream. As a result of being put off by Joseph’s superior and cloying attitude toward them, his brothers sold him into slavery. He was taken to Egypt by slave traders, where he was purchased by Potiphar, the second-in-command to the Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. Potiphar’s wife made a play for Joseph, and he fled from her, leaving behind his robe and every other stitch he was wearing, which she had grabbed in her libidinous lust (which is a kind of redundancy). Besides having dreams, Joseph could interpret dreams, and when the Pharoah heard about this, he asked him to interpret a strange dream he had, which Joseph did. As a result, Joseph himself became second-in-command to the Pharaoh. Having correctly interpreted the Pharaoh’s dream, Joseph saved the Egyptians from starvation during a famine. He also saved his own family back in Canaan, because they came down to Egypt for food during the famine. Joseph had ordered grain to be stored up for when the famine came, which he knew was coming because of Pharaoh’s dream.
Unfortunately, most people remember only one thing about Joseph, which is that he had a coat. Not only that, it was a coat of (…). That’s right; a coat of many colors. However, it is a coat of many colors only in the King James Version of the Bible. In the Revised Standard Version, it is a coat with long sleeves. Even though the RSV is a more accurate translation of the original Hebrew Bible than the KJV, we all know it was a coat of many colors, and that’s that. Whatever the coat actually looked like, it stuck in the craw of his ten older brothers, because their father gave them nothing but T-shirts and dirty jeans to wear, as you learned if you read the front cover of the bulletin this morning.
So finally we come to our first scripture reading. When the famine hit in Egypt, the Egyptians came to Joseph for grain, which he had warehoused in the bumper-crop years. He sold it to them on behalf of his boss, the Pharaoh. Nearly four thousand years ago, the profit motive was operative. It did not originate with Adam Smith and capitalism in the eighteenth century CE. The famine also hit in Canaan, which was just next door to Egypt, to the northeast. Jacob, hearing that there was grain to be purchased in Egypt, sent his ten oldest sons to Egypt to buy some. He kept his youngest son, Benjamin, with him, because he thought if something awful happened to the other sons, at least he would have one son left. Jacob thought he had already lost a son to death, because that is what the other sons told him about Joseph. They tore holes in Joseph’s coat of many colors and/or long sleeves, poured sheep’s blood on it, and told Jacob his favorite son had been eaten by a lion. Brokenhearted, Jacob swallowed their deception, hook, line, and stinker.
When Jacob’s sons got to Egypt, they went to the Pharaohonic Grain Sales Corporation, where Joseph was overseeing the sale of wheat, oats, barley, and millet. The brothers did not recognize Joseph, because he was just a boy when they sold him as a slave, but he recognized them. However, he didn’t tell them he knew who they were; he kept that as his own little secret. Joseph told them he thought they were spies, and they of course insisted they were not, which they weren’t. They were not very much into truth, but about that they were truthful. Further, they said, “We, your servants, are twelve brothers, the sons of one man…,and behold, the youngest is this day with our father, and one (son) is no more” (Gen. 42:13).
From this Joseph deduces several things. 1) These were indeed his ten older brothers. 2) His father was still alive. 3) His full blood-brother Benjamin, who was little more than a baby when Joseph was summarily sold into slavery by this maudlin mob of half-brothers, was also alive back home in Canaan. 4) If he didn’t sell them grain, his whole family would starve. But: 5) He would order them to return to Egypt with Benjamin just to verify their story, since Joseph clearly remembered they had never been noted for their veracity or reliability. Therefore he kept his half-brother Simeon as a hostage, and told them to take grain back to Canaan, but later to return to Egypt with Benjamin. Then Joseph ordered his underlings to fill each brother’s sack with grain, but to put the money they had paid for it back into the sack. Later, when they discovered the money, they were both flabbergasted and frightened. What could this mean? But they didn’t go back to ask Joseph; they just kept trucking for Canaan. If they went back, they feared Joseph might do them harm because of the mysterious money.
When they got home, the brothers told Jacob the whole story in every detail, including the money being in their grain sacks. Everyone was mystified by that, but they also were very grateful that the grain they had brought home with them would save them from starvation. Later, when it was all gone, they had no choice but to go back to Egypt, because the famine still persisted. As directed, they took Benjamin with them. When Joseph saw them again, he asked how their father was, the old man they had previously told him about. They said he was alive and well. So Joseph took the money they had brought with them to buy the grain, and had their sacks filled to the brim. As before, he ordered the underlings to put the money into the sacks, except that he ordered Benjamin’s money to be put into a silver cup at the bottom of his sack. Then the brothers left to return to Canaan.
Are you following all this? This a detective story, a mystery, a thriller, a whodunit. This story was told orally, word-for-word, to generations of Hebrews and Israelites and Jews, and then was finally and permanently put into writing about 550 BCE. Whoever first told this story loved every intertwined detail. It was so good that none of the details was ever forgotten, and that included Egyptians chasing the brothers and finding the silver cup which had been placed into Benjamin’s sack as planted evidence of an apparent crime.
Almost four thousand years after all this happened, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice set it to music in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. All of the special music Scott Camp played last Sunday and everything this Sunday is from that show. It is a happy, clappy, jivey musical . When Joseph ends up in Egypt, he thinks his life is all over, and mournfully he sings to God, “Close every door to me/ Hide all the world from me/ Bar all my windows and shut out the light./ Do what you will with me, hate me and laugh at me/ Darken my daytime and torture my night/ Close every door to me/ Keep those I love from me/ Children of Israel are never alone./ For I know I shall find/ My own peace of mind/ For I have been promised a land of my own.”
There it is! It is the promise --- again! It is the covenant --- again! That is the main theme of everything from Abraham to Joseph! The Jews have always believed that God promised them their own land. Whether that is undeniable is debatable, but Israel has always been convinced of it. The conquest was long and bloody, maintaining sovereignty was always difficult, establishing a new state of Israel in our own time has been a struggle involving the whole world, but the people of Israel have always insisted on a divine plan for this tortuous history.
In Elie Wiesel’s classic little memoir Night, about his time in a Nazi extermination camp during World War II, he tells of an elderly simple rabbi who was selected for death shortly before the Russians arrived to liberate the camp. In despair, the old man asked through his tears, “Where is God?” Eventually he composed himself, for he knew that even in a death camp God was there. He requested only one thing from his fellow prisoners, that when he had been incinerated, they were to say Kaddish, the prayers for the dead, on his behalf. When the time came, the other prisoners were too depleted themselves, and Elie Wiesel sadly admits that they forgot.
The entire Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Malachi, describes the conflict of God with Israel. God gave them His laws by means of Moses on Mt. Sinai, but often they neglected or rejected His laws. He gave them Canaan, or at least they were convinced He gave them Canaan, but they did not treat the Canaanites well or wisely.
It has never been easy for God to be God. We often thwart Him at every turn if we can. Nevertheless, God has a plan. God always has a plan --- for Joseph, for everyone in the Bible, for you and me, for everyone. He wants life to go well for us, for our lives to be fruitful and joyful and meaningful. But in order for that to happen, we need to follow the plan. We can’t go off on our own, seeking only what we want. We must seek to do what we know God wants. To follow the plan is to fulfill our role as sons and daughters of God.
The problem with humans is that we’re human. We do foolish and selfish and thoughtless things. It was not smart for Joseph to tell his brothers his dreams, because in his dreams he always lorded it over his brothers, and they didn’t like to hear that. When they became sufficiently fed up with their little brother, they sold him to some slave traders. They thought they were rid of him forever. That certainly wasn’t very nice, but it seems to have been a necessary factor in the grand scheme of things. Many years later, after Joseph had ended up in the household of Pharaoh and became like a son to him, the famine came, and the rest you know.
- · As we heard in the second reading, when the brothers returned to Egypt from Canaan with Benjamin, Joseph identified himself to his brothers. No doubt they were both shocked and mortified. What if he should turn on them, and demand their imprisonment, or worse, their execution? However, it became instantly evident that Joseph bore his brothers no enmity. He said to them, “Do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life” (Gen. 45:5). What happened years before, with the slave traders, was part of the plan! God didn’t instigate that; the brothers did it! But God used their sinful decision for His own good purposes. It was a way to save the children of Israel from starvation when the famine came. The brothers certainly didn’t know that, and I suspect Joseph at first didn’t know it, but looking back on it, in retrospect, Joseph saw the hand of God in every sordid event that had preceded that joyful if also completely unanticipated reunion of the twelve brothers.
“God sent me here before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth,’ said Joseph, “and to keep alive for you many survivors” (45:7). How can God give Israel a land of their own if there are no Israelites to receive the land? God will keep His side of the promise, but what if the children of Israel starve in a prolonged Middle Eastern famine? Joseph continued, “So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt.” (45:8)
Now listen very carefully. This entire wonderful story may not have happened exactly as it is recorded. Furthermore, none of its meaning was immediately clear to the brothers. They were terrified that Joseph would take vengeance on them. They knew he had every reason to do so. But Joseph had thought long and hard about all this after the brothers first returned to Canaan and the second time they came to Egypt for more grain. The Bible is a theological interpretation of human events from the viewpoint of faith in God. Nothing that happens in the Bible is obviously God-induced history; nothing. It is just written to look that way. It is events seen through the lens of faith in God. From the standpoint of the writers of the Bible in both the Hebrew and the Greek scriptures, they were essentially not reporting the acts of men; they were reporting, as the great Old Testament scholar, G. Ernest Wright, wrote over fifty years ago, the mighty acts of God.
But God didn’t cause Joseph to have self-promoting dreams or his brothers to sell him into slavery or to convince the elderly Jacob that his sons must go to Egypt, where grain had been stored up in the event of a famine. People did that: Joseph, and his brothers, and his father. The vital and irreplaceable factor in all of this is what is known as the doctrine of providence. Providence is the notion that God uses human choices for His own purposes. God uses our choices; He does not cause them or engineer them or manipulate them. Instead, God utilizes them to fit into His own designs for us.
Anybody reading Genesis for the first time who had never heard of God would be mystified by what Genesis says about God. What would be very clear to such a person, however, is that the characters in Genesis seem to have major character flaws. All of the men have flaws as evident as elephantiasis, and all of the women seem like mere pawns of the men. Nevertheless, God used these broken and highly imperfect people to build a nation without whom the entire world would be vastly diminished had Israel never existed. Our planet has been blessed by the people Israel, from the time of Abraham to the present time. The world, especially the Western world, would be so much less were it not for the gracious influence of Am Yisroel, the People of Israel.
In the world, God does few things directly. He may possibly do nothing at all, directly. Instead, He works His will through us. We might like it to be different, we might think it is different, but if we think about it, and truly ponder it, that is the way God works: through us. “Have Thine own way, Lord” is a familiar evangelical hymn. It says, “Thou art the potter; I am the clay.” For reasons that can be known only to God, His choice is to use our choices to effect His purposes.
“Do not be distressed or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life….So it was not you who sent me here, but God” (Gen/ 45:5,8).
The truth of those statements is not self-evident. It is evident only to the eyes of faith. God works in a mysterious way His wonders to perform. Be still, my soul, the Lord is on thy side.