Brother Joseph

Starting today, and for most of the next fourteen weeks or so, our sermons here at Centre are going to be based on the Old Testament lesson. We are going to pay careful attention to God’s covenant love with Israel, starting this morning with Joseph and continuing through the birth of Moses and the Exodus to the entry into the Promised Land under Joshua. Along with the story of the life of Jesus Christ, this long story is the core story of our Christian faith.

            Now, when I say, “The Old Testament,” what do I mean? Well, the Bible, our Scripture, is divided into two unequal parts. The second part is the New Testament, which has the gospels, Acts, and letters of the early church. The first and longer part is the Old Testament—sometimes called the First Testament, the First or Old Covenant, or even the Hebrew Bible—because most of it (though not all) was written originally in ancient Hebrew. We share the books of the Old Testament with Judaism. The Old Testament is in four parts: the Five Books of Moses, Genesis through Deuteronomy; the histories, Joshua through Nehemiah; the literature, Esther through Song of Songs; and the prophets, Isaiah through Malachi. The sermons over the next few months will take us from the end of Genesis into Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Joshua.

            Over the centuries Christians have struggled with the Old Testament. For the writers of the New Testament, the Old Testament is “the Bible.” Jesus quotes it, Paul refers to it, and when 2 Timothy 3:16 says, “All Scripture is inspired by God,” it means the Old Testament. But it didn’t take long for problems to crop up. Some people thought they saw a difference between the God of the Old Testament and the God of Jesus Christ. They wanted to get rid of the Old Testament altogether. Others thought that God was done with Israel and that the Old Testament was only meaningful in reference to Christ. Many Christians today have gone their whole lives without reading the Old Testament.

            We Methodists, joining with Christians of various stripes from across the globe and across time, believe that God is the God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rachel, Moses and Miriam, David and Bathsheba—and the God of Jesus Christ. In fact, one of our Articles of Religion (the standards of United Methodist doctrine) says that “The Old Testament is not contrary to the New; for both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to mankind by Christ… Wherefore they are not to be heard who feign that the old fathers did look only for transitory promises… [and] no Christian whatsoever is free from the obedience of the commandments which are called moral.”

            Now, please forgive the language, which is more King James than Facebook. What this article means is this. When we read the Old Testament, we need to read it on its own terms. That means, first, that we listen to the stories, psalms, and prophecies for what they have to say on their own. If we have trouble with them, we keep reading, searching for God’s presence in these passages. Then, we can listen to the stories for Christ’s silhouette and for what God is saying to us today. You see, Israel—the people of God in the Old Testament, not the modern nation-state created by the vestiges of Western colonialism—is whom God loves. God never gives up his love for his people Israel. Jesus Christ is the ultimate sign of God’s love for Israel, not the end of it.

            Let’s turn our attention to this morning’s Old Testament lesson. Here we are introduced to the story of Joseph. Joseph is one of the sons of Rachel, Jacob’s wife. Jacob is the son of Isaac, who is the son of Abraham. Confused yet?

            Genesis tells us that Jacob favored Joseph more than his other children. In the ancient near East, this would have been a scandal; the oldest child was the one who was to be given preference. But already in Genesis there has been a pattern of turning this on its head: God prefers the younger Abel’s gift to that of the older Cain; God chooses the younger Isaac instead of the older Ishmael; Jacob cheats his older brother Esau out of their father’s blessing; and now, Jacob loves his young son Joseph more than all his other children.

            The Bible does not praise Jacob for giving Joseph preferential treatment. In fact, Jacob’s love for his young son gets Joseph into trouble. Joseph’s brothers are jealous and plot against him. Of course, Joseph’s dreams don’t help, either. We skipped over that part today, but Joseph’s dreams are all about how his brothers will serve and bow before him. Not the kind of thing that might cool down a simmering sibling rivalry. Joseph’s brothers decide to kill him. They band together and grab their unsuspecting little brother, tear off the beautiful coat Jacob gave him, and throw him into a pit. Only the intervention of Reuben, the eldest brother, prevents the others from murdering their own flesh and blood. Instead they sell him to caravanning Ishmaelites—distant cousins—and Joseph becomes the first Israelite slave in Egypt.

            It’s a depressing tale, all the more so because it is so familiar and so—common. After all, for the first hundred years the U.S. depended on slave labor for its economic success. At first slavers traded in Africans—distant cousins. When the Middle Passage finally closed, however, slaves were still bought and sold—the children of other slaves. Because a master owned the body of his women slaves, often the slaves he bought and sold were his own children, or, when the elder master had passed, were the stepbrothers and stepsisters of the new master. Every slave bought and sold was a Joseph, a brother or a sister done wrong by another brother or sister. Sadly, slavery did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation. The sins of our slaveholding forefathers have been visited on generation after generation. And new forms of slavery, legal and illegal, continue to grip our world. We live in a land where the cries of so many Josephs still echo from the pit.

            Joseph is not just the brother of Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Benjamin, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. He is my brother and yours.

            We read of slavery ancient and modern, new and old, and we ask, “Where is God in this?” We hear of brothers throwing brothers into pits, of loved ones turning on each other over petty grievances, and the world asks us, “Where is now your God?” The text in Genesis 37 is silent; God’s name is not mentioned in this story. But we know the answer. Where is God? God is in the pit.

            Joseph was stripped of his blessing, his coat and his father’s love, thrown into the pit by his brothers, and sold into slavery in Egypt. Jesus was stripped of his seamless garment, betrayed by his friends, hung on a cross, and thrown into the pit right next to him. And if we would claim Jesus as our Lord, we must never forget that Joseph is our brother. Amen.