The Story of Joseph’s Brothers Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28 The Rev. Dr. Carolyn Browning Helsel August 10, 2014 The Presbyterian Church in Sudbury

This summer, I’ve been preaching on the stories in the Old Testament from the lectionary readings in Genesis. We started with Abraham and Isaac, then Rebekah, Esau, Jacob, and then one of Jacob’s wives, Leah. Last week we heard about how Jacob’s name became “Israel,” and this week, our story focuses on the sons of Jacob. Jacob had twelve sons and a daughter. His two youngest sons were Joseph and Benjamin. While the older sons were the children of Leah, Bilhah, and Zilpah, the two youngest sons—Joseph and Benjamin—were the children of Rachel, who was the woman Jacob loved dearly. But Rachel died when giving birth to Benjamin, so now, the two youngest sons are all that Jacob has left of his beloved wife. This week and next we’ll be following the story of Joseph and his brothers, this week, focusing on his older brothers, and next week focusing on the character of Joseph. Our story today begins in chapter 37 of Genesis, beginning with the first four verses, and then continuing on from verses 12-28:

Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28 37Jacob settled in the land where his father had lived as an alien, the land of Canaan. 2This is the story of the family of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was shepherding the flock with his brothers; he was a helper to the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives; and Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father. 3Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he had made him a long robe with sleeves. 4But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably to him. [the lectionary skips us past Joseph’s dreams to what happens later with his brothers…] 12 Now his brothers went to pasture their father’s flock near Shechem. 13And Israel [previously known as Jacob] said to Joseph, ‘Are not your brothers pasturing the flock at Shechem? Come, I will send you to them.’ He answered, ‘Here I am.’ 14So he said to him, ‘Go now, see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock; and bring word back to me.’ So he sent him from the valley of Hebron. He came to Shechem, 15and a man found him wandering in the fields; the man asked him, ‘What are you seeking?’ 16‘I am seeking my brothers,’ he said; ‘tell me, please, where they are pasturing the flock.’ 17The man said, ‘They have gone away, for I heard them say, “Let us go to Dothan.” ’ So Joseph went after his brothers, and found them at Dothan. 18They saw him from a distance, and before he came near to them, they conspired to kill him. 19They said to one another, ‘Here comes this dreamer. 20Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.’ 21But when Reuben heard it, he delivered him out of their hands, saying, ‘Let us not take his life.’ 22Reuben said to them, ‘Shed no blood; throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but lay no hand on him’—that he might rescue him out of their hand Carolyn Browning Helsel p. 2 and restore him to his father. 23So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the long robe with sleeves that he wore; 24and they took him and threw him into a pit. The pit was empty; there was no water in it. 25 Then they sat down to eat; and looking up they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, with their camels carrying gum, balm, and resin, on their way to carry it down to Egypt. 26Then Judah said to his brothers, ‘What profit is there if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? 27Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not lay our hands on him, for he is our brother, our own flesh.’ And his brothers agreed. 28When some Midianite traders passed by, they drew Joseph up, lifting him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. And they took Joseph to Egypt.”

This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

To end each of our scripture readings with the phrase “This is the Word of the Lord,” and to have the congregation respond by saying “Thanks be to God,” would make a lot more sense if all the texts we read were clearly, well, religious. Something that has something to do with God, or with Jesus, or a story about God interacting with God’s people—something like that. But the truth is, there is a lot in the Bible that does not sound like it has much to do with anything, let alone God. Take all those long genealogies—who is the son of whom, who is the son of so-and- so, etc. What do the recitations of family history books have to do with God?

The Scripture text we read this morning makes no mention of God whatsoever. It’s a story about a blended family, where one child is the father’s favorite. The evil step-brothers are so jealous of their father’s favorite son that they plot to kill him—it’s like a strange blend of Snow-White’s-evil-Step-Mother and Cinderella’s-evil-step-sisters all on steroids and played by men. In Snow White, the evil Step-Mother-Queen tells the huntsman to kill Snow White in the woods because she was so jealous of Snow White’s beauty. Instead, the huntsman sends Snow White into the forest and brings back a pig’s heart to pretend to the evil Queen that he had killed her. In our text this morning, Joseph’s brothers kill a goat and smear the goat’s blood on Joseph’s fancy robe to make it look like Joseph had been killed by a wild animal, when in fact they had sold him into slavery. They are playing the part of the trickster, tricking their father Jacob, getting rid of their brother for good, (or so they thought), by covering up their murderous intentions by putting the blame on a wild animal. It’s like a really strange fairy tale, except without the happy ending…at least not in what we read here. So what does this have to do with God?

I ask myself that question sometimes when I’m looking online at the news reports—continuing conflict between Hamas and Israel and the terrible brutality in Iraq of Syrians against Arab Christians, and now the US military’s involvement in sending airstrikes into Iraq and Syria. What does this have to do with God?

Carolyn Browning Helsel p. 3

When there is not a happy ending in sight, and the winners appear to be those who have the biggest weapons or who can be the most violent, what does this have to do with God? Where is God in all of this? Part of my struggle with this text this week, was that I was intending to empathize with Joseph’s brothers. I tend to try and play devil’s advocate, a phrase which sounds blasphemous when spoken in a sermon, but I try to take others’ points of view, to try and understand where others are coming from. And I could definitely sense that these brothers had some reason to be ticked off by their brother. I wanted to try and understand the story from their point of view. And right at the beginning, you hear some of that—Joseph was 17, a teenager, and was a helper to his older brothers. He was not appointed leader over his older brothers, but a helper. And Joseph gives a negative report about them to their father—like your new assistant telling the general manager that you’re not meeting your daily quotas. Not the kind of thing younger assistants are supposed to be saying, not if they want to keep their jobs, and in Joseph’s case, he should have been a bit smarter if he wanted to stay in his brothers’ good graces. And now his older brothers were not just the children of the same mother as Joseph, but like I mentioned earlier, they were sons of different mothers, while Joseph was the son of his father’s beloved wife, Rachel. So the brothers that Joseph was tattling on were the sons not of Rachel, nor of her sister Leah, but of their maids, Bilhah and Zilpah. So you’re already talking about guys who are tired of preferential treatment always going to the sons born to Rachel and Leah. This preferential treatment may not always be obvious in the text—all these sons were equally considered Jacob’s sons, and in the inheritance and future of Israel, the twelve tribes of Israel were each descended from the sons of Israel, Jacob’s twelve sons. But even though they shared in some part of the inheritance, the fact that their father treated their younger brother with such favoritism made them furious. And then you have to really hear some of what Joseph said to his brothers to understand how mad they were with him—he had dreams of how he was the big shot, and that his brothers were going to have to bow down to him. You know, the kind of stuff big brothers love to hear coming from their younger brother, the kid towards whom their dad already plays favorites. Telling his brothers about these dreams only added fuel to the fire of their resentment. So, now you know the back-story, then, you, too, can see why his brothers wanted to kill him. Wait… yes, I can understand the resentment, the jealousy, the discouragement after years of watching their younger brother get preferential treatment—he even gets his own fancy robe with long sleeves—that’s a lot to have to take in. But is it justification for wanting to kill someone? The text says Joseph’s brothers hated him. Hate is a really strong word. Hate is what you see in the news, the violence of war, the killing of innocents. Hatred is in the vitriol of back-and-forth blaming for who is at fault, who is the worse offender, which side is truly less-than-human. Hatred can turn brother against brother, families imploding from the explosive disease of hatred. Carolyn Browning Helsel p. 4

Is there a line one crosses between anger and hatred? Is there some way to tease out the tangle of fear and self-preservation from the dehumanization of another? I’m not sure. And I’m not sure of any line that makes any real sense except for the line of electrocardiograms, the heart monitors that show when a person is alive—their heart is beating, the line shows jagged peaks, a line which changes when that person slips into the sleep from which no one returns, and their heart stops beating. The line goes flat. That’s the only line that makes sense when it comes to understanding the power of hatred. It’s line that once crossed can never be taken back. Hatred draws near to that line, and crosses it all the time. Death is not always the result of hatred. All persons die, it is part of what it means to be alive, that we will die. But when death comes as a result of hatred, the whole earth has to ask, why? Where is God? Where is God in all of this? Fortunately, we are not alone. God may not come down with a Superman cape and blast all the villains to pieces—no, because even blasting the villains is another way that hatred works to dehumanize others. God does not come down like a Superman, or a Fairy Godmother or Prince Charming or any other character from a fairy tale. God comes down as a person, Jesus Christ, who tells us—love your neighbors as yourself. And God continues to show us a love that holds that fragile line of our existence with the greatest of care and tenderness, and if we look closely into our stories, we can find a thin thread of God’s grace woven throughout even the least-unlikely-to-end-happily-stories. Take Joseph’s brothers. One among them (the oldest, Reuben), stood up and said, “wait. Let’s not kill him. Let’s put him in a pit until we decide what to do.” And later, his brother Judah suggested: “yeah, guys, let’s not kill him. We can sell him to these traders coming along the road.” This may not be great consolation, especially when Joseph probably would have preferred that his brothers let him stay at home, tending the sheep, you know, returning to life as normal. But no one had any idea of how unlikely “life as normal” would be in the near future anyway. The whole country experiences a huge drought in the next few years, and if it wasn’t for Joseph being removed from that situation and placed in another situation where he actually could have a made a real difference in his family’s life, they all would have died. And yes, his brothers sold him to traders, but these were not just any ol’ traders. These were Ishmaelites. Descended from Abraham’s son, Ishmael, the brother of their grandfather, Isaac. So Joseph was actually being carried away from one dangerous situation by the hands of those who had also known abandonment by one’s family— their father Ishmael had to live alone in the desert with his mother, but God had provided for them, and so they will help provide safe passage for Joseph. God works in mysterious ways. We do not know how God will redeem these brothers, and we do not know how God will redeem this world where brothers continue to rage against brothers, humans failing to see one another as humans. But we can see that even among groups that are working to harm others, such as this band of Joseph’s brothers, that there is one, and then another, who stands up among them and says, wait. Let’s not do this. The words of Judah, when trying to persuade the others not to kill Joseph: Carolyn Browning Helsel p. 5

“let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not lay our hands on him, for he is our brother, our own flesh.” He is our brother, our own flesh!

We are humans. We are going to get angry, there are going to be differences and conflict. But if we can remind ourselves, these are our brothers! Our sisters! Our own flesh! Then perhaps we can stem some of this vicious cycle of killing and revenge and retaliation. These are our brothers, our sisters, our own flesh.

So while this text does not mention God anywhere that we read, we can read God in and through this text, as a testimony to the way God works in and through our most discouraging stories. God is at work in our stories, and God is at work in the world. We may not know the final outcome, but we can trust the One who we find in these words, the One we know as the Word of God, and that this God will continue to speak to us, in and through our stories, in and through our lives, in and around the world. And that indeed, we can read these ancient words and proclaim, “This is the Word of the Lord, Thanks be to God.” Amen.