Anything but Ordinary: Joseph Reveals Himself to His Brothers (Genesis 45:1-15)
Ordinary Time
Joseph could no longer control himself in front of all
his attendants, so he declared, “Everyone, leave now!” So no one stayed with
him when he revealed his identity to his brothers. 2 He
wept so loudly that the Egyptians and Pharaoh’s household heard him. 3 Joseph
said to his brothers, “I’m Joseph! Is my father really still alive?” His
brothers couldn’t respond because they were terrified before him.
4 Joseph said to his
brothers, “Come closer to me,” and they moved closer. He said, “I’m your
brother Joseph! The one you sold to Egypt. 5 Now,
don’t be upset and don’t be angry with yourselves that you sold me here. Actually,
God sent me before you to save lives. 6 We’ve
already had two years of famine in the land, and there are five years left
without planting or harvesting. 7 God sent me
before you to make sure you’d survive and to rescue your lives in this
amazing way. 8 You didn’t send me here; it was God
who made me a father to Pharaoh, master of his entire household, and ruler of
the whole land of Egypt.
9 “Hurry! Go back to
your father. Tell him this is what your son Joseph says: ‘God has made me
master of all of Egypt. Come down to me. Don’t delay. 10 You may live in the land of
Goshen, so you will be near me, your children, your grandchildren, your flocks,
your herds, and everyone with you. 11 I will
support you there, so you, your household, and everyone with you won’t starve,
since the famine will still last five years.’ 12 You
and my brother Benjamin have seen with your own eyes that I’m speaking to
you. 13 Tell my father about my power in Egypt and
about everything you’ve seen. Hurry and bring my father down here.” 14 He threw his arms around his brother Benjamin’s neck and
wept, and Benjamin wept on his shoulder. 15 He
kissed all of his brothers and wept, embracing them. After that, his brothers
were finally able to talk to him. (CEB)
Last
weekend, Ann Arbor had its Pride celebration on Main Street downtown. The church I serve had a booth there, as did
a handful of other churches tucked among the regulars like the YMCA and one of
the local bars and the surprises like State Farm and the National Guard. I was there for the first “shift,” the first
four hours of the nine-hour event, and as an introvert who dislikes summer, of
course I was delighted to be in an impromptu social situation on a sunny August
day.
Because
I was there representing the church and because, as a queer clergyperson, I’m
aware that I’m sometimes more of a symbol than a person, I wore one of my
clerical collar shirts. There are few
things that announce “clergy” quite so clearly as a clerical collar, not least
because Catholic priests have rather cornered the market there, but I wanted
that nonverbal announcement. Pride is a
place to be your full self, and my full self now includes ordained clergy
status. To some, however, that meant
that I arrived in the uniform of the enemy, and they wanted nothing to do with
that.
We
pick up the story of Joseph today in a lectionary reading that has skipped
Joseph’s unloving decisions. Last week
in the apparent “sermon series that never ends,” Barry talked about young
Joseph, the arrogant teenager who preened in his father Jacob’s favoritism as
he got to dodge shepherding and instead be a snitch against his brothers. Jacob built a family system that could not
help but fail, as had his father Isaac and his father’s father Abraham before
him. Last week, Joseph was the one with
less power, losing to his older brothers who’d had enough and threw him in a
well before changing course to sell him off—out of sight, out of mind, out of
their lives. It broke Jacob’s heart, and
the wedge within the family went deeper.
This
week, we skip to Joseph’s reveal full of loud, messy tears and full-body hugs
and…terror. Because what we’ve skipped is
that there’s a famine—just as Joseph predicted in his many adventures between
being sold and, here, rising to a position in the inner cabinet of
Pharaoh. Joseph is now the one in power,
his brothers humbled at his feet asking for the most basic of necessities:
food.
And
Joseph messes with them. The verses of
reconciliation read today are lovely but, like all reconciliation, they must be
read in light of the harm done before.
Rather than give his famine-stretched family the food they request,
Joseph imprisons some of them, has them accused of theft, demands that the
youngest brother be brought and holds the necessary food as ransom, hiding
behind the Egyptian garb of his office to ensure that no one recognizes
him. It is his turn, now, to be
powerful when they are powerless, and I as a youngest sibling can imagine that
revenge is sweet indeed. Professor
Cameron B.R. Howard writes that, “It would be difficult to overstate Joseph’s
position of imperial power in this story; anyone who wants to eat must come to
Joseph. He hoards the grain, and he decides who may purchase it and at what
price, at a time when all of the world is riddled with famine (41:57). Once
powerless at the bottom of a pit, outnumbered by brothers who hated him, Joseph
now gets to decide who will live and who will die. Having that power does not
necessarily make Joseph a bad guy, but his use of that power to control those around
him surely does, no matter how much he cries.”[1]
And cry he
does, loudly enough that all of Pharaoh’s household hears his grief and,
perhaps, his own lingering fear. Time
has changed everyone in the family, and this time the brothers do not sacrifice
the youngest for their own gain; this time, they protect Benjamin as they never
did Joseph. Maybe it is this that breaks
Joseph’s plan, that prompts him to send everyone else away and announce
himself, asking after Jacob’s wellbeing.
Yet when he does so, he is still in the uniform of his Egyptian power;
he hasn’t given the food to the brothers yet, hasn’t said anything at all about
forgiveness, hasn’t apologized for abusing the long reach of his office. “I’m Joseph!” he cries. “Is my father really still alive?” And his brothers were terrified.
I
don’t wear my clerical collar very often.
For one thing, the tab is made of plastic and not particularly
comfortable, somewhat like a two-inch veterinary cone that limits my downward
movement. Mostly, though, I don’t want
to announce my profession in quite that loud a voice. There are so, so many people who have been
hurt by organized religion, and it is sometimes a straight ticket to being
brushed off when I say, verbally or not, that I’m a pastor. You may have experienced the same, that as
soon as some reference to your church attendance comes out, the subject hastily
switches. We may not have been as
directly in charge of causing the harm as Joseph was, but that doesn’t mean we
aren’t part of it. We, too, wear the
Egyptian kohl around our eyes, holding the grain in our power; we, too, carry
the might of an empire in the crosses we wear around our necks.
At Pride, people were wary of me at first, waving from a safe distance. But about an hour in, there was a street preacher who wandered through with a megaphone announcing the need for the repentance of sinners, garbling the so-called “clobber verses” that are used to leave queer folk bloody as Christ and nail them to the cross as though it will heal us. And so I went into the crowd, in my collar, and handed out cards that had blessings written on them. “This is a blessing to remind you,” it said, “with strength and gentleness, that your body is a temple, whole and beautiful, worthy and unique. It is entirely yours, as you dance, sing, weep, rage, and live in its honest holiness. There is no one's permission you need for this, for God has never left your temple and is with you, affirming you each day as beloved, and wonderful, and enough.”[2]
“God sent me before you to make sure you’d survive and to rescue your lives in this amazing way. You didn’t send me here; it was God who made me a father to Pharaoh, master of his entire household, and ruler of the whole land of Egypt.” Joseph’s ability to dismiss his brothers’ cruelty as too little to stop God, his ability to remind them again and again that he is the powerful one here, that he has risen far beyond them, tastes bittersweet on the tongue. The balance of debts between the sons of Jacob is forever unbalanced; they have all hurt each other immeasurably, because they are a mess, but God works with messes all the time and makes them beautiful. Pastor Geoff McElroy writes that, “There is no direct revelation of the covenant in the Joseph cycle, at least not to Joseph. Nowhere does God appear to Joseph and definitely declare that he was the person through whom the promise would continue. God instead had been working behind the scenes and on the down low, working through and among human plans and manipulations.”[3]
In one of
the most reassuring promises in history, God does not wait for this Abrahamic
family to get their act together before being part of the narrative, bending
what was awful—selfishness, slavery, prison, famine, fear—into the good of
safety, of enough, of hope. The
difference between God redeeming suffering from God causing it is a different
sermon for a different day, but today we as the readers and Joseph as the actor
point out that nothing has pushed God and God’s care for God’s people out of
the picture. God made a promise to
Abraham, to Isaac, and God is keeping it, even if every last one of the twelve
sons gets in the way. “You may live in
the land of Goshen, so you will be near me, your children, your grandchildren,
your flocks, your herds, and everyone with you. I will support you there, so
you, your household, and everyone with you won’t starve, since the famine will
still last five years.” Joseph is a jerk
the entirety of this story, and still he can see enough to say, “God calls us
to something different. Come, be safe
here. Be fed here.”
But it is
not until he embraces his brothers that they can truly feel safe. “He threw his arms around his brother
Benjamin’s neck and wept, and Benjamin wept on his shoulder. He kissed all of
his brothers and wept, embracing them. After that, his brothers were finally
able to talk to him.”
I
cannot erase the harm that the Church has done, is doing, to so many
groups of people, queer folk included. I
can try not to participate in it, but that fails too, sometimes. Systems are hard, and learned prejudice is
harder. But I can say that on a sunny
Saturday in August, God loves you. (On a
rainy Tuesday in December, God also loves you.
All the days, God loves you, just in case you thought it was a
time-sensitive thing.) It is when Joseph
stops being an Egyptian official and starts being a person who loves and hates
and cries and hugs and hopes and fears—that is when his brothers realize
this is good, this is holy, even. When I
walked around Pride in my collar, I was only a uniform; but when people came up
to me and told me their stories; when people said the Church has been horrible
and I said yes instead of trying to justify it, that was when change
happened. God was present in the places
where we were human together, sweating in the sunlight.
People
talked about how important it was to see churches in our booths there; they
commented about what a beautiful shock it was to see someone who looks like me
in a clerical collar; they complimented my pronoun pin and were floored that a
nonbinary person could be part of a faith that has so many binaries. Even if none of those people ever set foot in
a church again, God is with them, at work in their lives through and despite
encounters with people like me who wear the uniform of power. They will not starve, for thankfully the
bread of Life isn’t only owned by those of us with steeple-topped grain silos.
Like
Joseph, it is so easy for me to tell this tale in a way that makes me
impressive, because this is one of the good stories. But like Joseph, we are all called to be the
messy horror of human with each other, rumpling our beautiful silks and getting
coffee on our sanctuary floors and even crying where people can see you in
order to recognize that God has been patiently walking alongside, waiting for
us to realize that vengeance or power or glory or judgment are not ours. They are God’s, each and every time, and ours
is prayer, and love, and hope, and faith, and wonder, and contrition, and
forgiveness, and strength, and maybe, sometimes, humility.
Where
in your life are you hiding behind the power of your office, beloved? Where are you faced with those who fear not
who you are but what they see? How can
you learn to listen to those who need you to hear that the uniform you wear is louder
than the words you speak, that no matter how raucously you claim that you are a
brother or sister or sibling, they only see the power of Egypt ready to press
them down? Recognizing that kind of
privilege in ourselves is incredibly difficult, especially if it is an
unintentional power. But we must; we who
know that God is at work leveling mountains and raising valleys, we who know
God sends us into a hurting world to help the healing, must recognize when we
are part of the hurt and step back, listen, perhaps even hug.
Ask
first about the hug. Consent is
kindness.
May
God’s work in turning your sorrow into joy be made obvious. May God’s work through you be made
merciful. And may we all be given spirits
of courage to step back enough to listen, and love, as the messy family we
are. Amen.
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