In our Old Testament reading
today, we move from the story of Jacob to the story of his family, a large
group of boys.
If you remember the story of
Jacob, we recall that his father, Isaac, preferred his elder son Esau, and it
was only by trickery that Jacob got his father’s blessing. What ensued was
years of pain and anger and fear.
You’d think that Jacob would have
learned from his own experience that favoring one child over the others causes
problems. But family behavior tends to repeat itself, doesn’t it? And so Jacob
loves his youngest child, Joseph, the best.
But Joseph seems like an annoying
brat, braying over and over again that he can interpret dreams. And his father
seems to ignore the obnoxious behavior, perhaps because he was once equally
obnoxious, and even gives him a special coat to wear, an expensive coat, a
beautiful coat of a hundred different colors.
And his brothers understandably
resent all this. Sibling rivalry, as bad or worse than that between Jacob and
his brother Esau.
But, unlike Esau, they act. When
his father sends Joseph out to check on his brothers where they are herding
sheep, they decide to get rid of him. Not kill him, at least not directly. At
first some of them want to kill him, but Reuben says no. He doesn’t want Joseph’s
blood on his hands. So he says, “Let’s throw him into that deep pit over there.”
Reuben intends to rescue him later, after they’ve put a good scare into him. So
they take his coat and toss him into the pit. They smear blood on the coat –
they will tell their father that a wild animal got Joseph – and ready
themselves to return to Jacob, but then something happens –
A caravan of Ishmaelites appears,
passing through, on the way to Egypt. The brothers sell the boy as a slave to
them for twenty pieces of silver, thinking it is not good for a brother to kill
a brother. Perhaps this generation has learned something from the past. Cain
and Abel, Jacob and Esau, somehow they’ve learned that even in the greatest
anger, killing is not a good solution.
We’ll hear more about Joseph in
the weeks to come, but at least we hear something that has the possibility of redemption.
Killing is forever, but this has the chance for making things right again.
It is not a coincidence that this
story of Joseph and his brothers is linked to the story of Jesus walking on
troubled waters.
Imagine the scene we hear of in the
Gospel: Jesus wants some time alone to pray and to rest, after the feeding of
the five thousand. He sends the disciples on ahead of him, in a boat, across
the sea.
While they’re out in the boat, in
the middle of the sea, a great storm comes up, and it looks like the boat will
be swamped and they will drown. To say that they are afraid is an
understatement. Jesus sees them, and knows their fear, so he goes to them.
He walks to them, across the
water. He doesn’t swim. He walks. On top of the water.
They see him, but in the midst of
the spray and the waves and their own seasickness, they don’t recognize him. He
calls out to them, but they think their eyes are playing tricks on them. No man
walks on water.
Perhaps it is a ghost. Perhaps
not.
So Peter calls out, “Lord, if it
is you, call me to come to you on the water.” Peter, like many fisherman,
cannot swim, so he is asking for a lot. It’s not merely a test of Jesus’ voice,
it’s a test of Jesus’ power.
And Jesus calls. And Peter gets
out of the boat, and promptly goes under the heaving waves, crying to Jesus to
save him. Jesus reaches down, hauls him into the boat and gets into the boat
himself, and the storm immediately stops. Jesus chides Peter, saying that his
lack of faith was what caused him to sink. All the disciples say “we believe,
Lord!”
On the face of it, these stories
from the Gospel and the Hebrew Bible don’t have much to do with each other.
But look below the surface, and
you’ll note some interesting things.
In both stories, people are far
away from home, in a state of disorientation. The brothers of Joseph? Distressed
at their father’s favor toward their brother Joseph, away from their father and
their home guarding the sheep. The disciples? Exhausted after the feeding of
the five thousand, away from their rabbi and dry land and headed for the other
side of the sea.
In both stories, emotions run
high. Jealousy, fear, anger, doubt.
In both stories, surprising things
happen that derail what we thought was the pattern: a caravan of Ishmaelites
passing through, a sudden storm, a person walking on top of water.
In both stories, the recognition
that what God wants is at variance with what human beings expect to do.
Joseph does not die. His story
continues.
The disciples do not drown. Jesus
reveals his power in a surprising way to save them. Their story continues.
It’s good to remember these two
oddly linked stories when we are in the midst of our own storms, when our
emotions overwhelm us, when we are angry, afraid, despairing, jealous.
Our stories continue, because God
is a part of them. Our stories continue because God sends some Ishmaelites to
interrupt a planned fratricide. Our stories continue because God walks out onto
the water, in contravention of all we know about the science of water. Our
stories continue because God wants us to continue God’s story. We are the
bearers of the word. We carry God’s story forward in how we live our lives.
We walk, as the shepherding
brothers of Joseph walked. We walk, as the Ishmaelites walked toward Egypt. We
walk, as Jesus walked, to say that it is possible that water can be walked
upon, that people who want to kill each other can learn a better way, that a
slave in Egypt can become Pharaoh’s right hand man and reconcile with his
family.
We walk by faith, because Jesus
walked, to be the way, that the world might learn God’s will.
We walk, and we pray that others
might walk with us, against the old way and toward the new.
Amen.
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