A sermon for Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation,
the online gathering of Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church,
September 27 2020
Genesis 37.3-8, 17b-22, 26-34; 50:15-21
It is very hard, for some of us, to hear the Joseph story from the book of Genesis
without
feeling the overwhelming urge to break into song.
Many years ago, when Liz and I were studying Biblical
Studies at Sheffield,
one of the
exam questions we were set related to the Joseph story,
and you could sense people all around the room
running
through the names of the brothers,
in
descending order of age,
by singing Andrew
Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice quietly to themselves.
And brilliant though Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour
Dreamcoat may be,
it is only
one way of reading this story.
Whilst this story certainly lends itself to the genre
of a
child-friendly musical with a happy ending and a grand finale,
there are other themes here which are rather more troubling…
You see, the Joseph story is not, actually, a positive one.
In addition to the themes of sibling rivalry, deception, and
violence,
it is a story
that functions, within the narrative sweep of the book of Genesis,
to explain the
enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt.
The end of this story is not the happy reunion of Joseph and
his family,
it’s the
slavery of the Jews at the hands of the Pharaoh.
The irony of the Joseph saga
is that the
very family sold their brother into slavery,
become
those who have to sell themselves into slavery
to
get grain to escape the famine.
This is a kind of story known as an ‘origin story’,
and all
cultures have them.
They are the kind of founding-myth stories
that set
the scene for the world that follows them.
In the case of the Joseph stories,
they
function to explain the socio-economic reality
of Egypt as
a land where all its riches are in the hands of a ruling elite,
whilst the
descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
are
locked into multi-generational servitude.
In other words,
it sets the
scene for the story of Moses and the Exodus.
It’s often overlooked,
but here we
have the first example in the story of Israel
of
what will become their experience down the millennia,
of being
prey to forces which will seek to scapegoat and enslave them
due
to their ‘otherness’,
to turn
their religious and ethnic identity into a marker of oppression.
From Egypt, to Babylon, to Rome, to Venice, to Auschwitz, to
our world,
this is a
story that echoes down through history
in
disturbingly contemporary ways.
And it all starts with Joseph.
The focus for today’s sermon is not specifically on
antisemitism,
but it is
worth holding that long and violent history of oppression in our minds
as we
explore this story and its implications for us.
The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann
raises a startling,
but obvious question.
He asks, why is it
that God is frequently described as
“the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob”
but never as
“the God of Abraham,
Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph”?
Joseph’s absence from Israel’s theological and
origin-explaining mantra
is on the
surface mystifying.[1]
After all, Joseph at the beginning of his story
is all-set
to be the next great patriarch of Judaism.
He’s dreaming dreams of God’s promise,
and by one
reading of things, the unfolding of that dream into reality
gives the
shape of his entire story.
However, Joseph’s dream is also rather different
to that of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
It’s not a dream of a covenant of blessing for the people of
Israel,
and through
them the whole world.
Rather, it’s one of God’s blessing to him, personally.
According to Joseph’s dream, he would be first, in spite of
birth order.
And everyone
would bow down before him.
And sure enough, in the story of his life, despite its
traumatic moments,
he ends up
being rescued from death and prison,
to
rise to the greatest heights in Egyptian affairs.
And his
brothers and father do indeed bow before him.
So, with such a story of success,
why doesn’t
Joseph have his place
with the
other three ancestors whose stories comprise Genesis?
Why is his name not remembered in the same way?
Brueggemann ventures an answer.
He suggests that Joseph’s name was dropped,
because he
conducted the imperial work of Pharaoh.
Instead of resisting, he collaborated with the figure
who later threatens
Israel’s very existence.
And here we find ourselves in the world of competing dreams.
Abraham
dreamed of faithfulness to God,
and
of God’s blessing for his descendants and the world.
Joseph
dreamed of personal greatness.
And Pharaoh
dreamed of disaster for his empire.
And as we all know from Andrew Lloyd-Webber,
The King, I
mean Pharaoh, was deeply disturbed by a dream of his own,
a
nightmare of a coming threat;
and Joseph
became not only the interpreter of Pharaoh’s dream,
but
also the consultant, manager, and chaplain of that nightmare.
From his position of royal power,
Joseph
seized all the money, all the livestock,
and
even all the bodies of Pharaoh’s subjects,
all for the
sake of establishing what became an imperial food monopoly.
The famine may have been managed,
but the end
result of the crisis was that the rich got richer,
the
poor were impoverished and enslaved,
and Joseph
made it all happen.
So, Brueggemann suggests,
Joseph
traded in the old covenantal dreams of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob;
and in the interest of fulfilling his own visions of
grandeur
gave
himself over to what Brueggemann calls
“the deep,
defining nightmare of the empire.”
And that nightmare remains with us to this day,
co-opting
us to its will,
by fuelling
our fantasies of grandeur and success.
But back to the story:
Putting it
bluntly, Joseph’s actions in Egypt
paved the
way for Israel’s slavery in Egypt.
Joseph isn’t a God-honouring hero,
he’s a
self-honouring survivalist.
And so as the Joseph story is retold and reshaped down the
generations,
Joseph’s
name remains significantly absent
from
Israel’s formula of heroic and defining patriarchs.
So, how might we read and hear this passage?
Well, maybe a starting point is to recognise
that Christians
and Jews alike are heirs to a vision of God
who
is in the process of healing and reconciling all creation,
and that God’s
covenant promise made to Abraham
is
the calling out of a people of faith in each generation,
through
whom all the nations of the world will be blessed.
Therefore the people of God are always to be a people
open to
both receive God’s blessing,
and to
being used for God’s good purposes in the world.
And this calling will, or at least should, always contrast
with Pharaoh’s
“deep defining nightmare”,
of
an empire that obsessively grapples
with the threats to its security and
scarcity.
So, what kind of people are
we going to be?
What dream,
what vision, is going to drive us?
Are we going to be God’s people of faith,
or
Pharaoh’s agents of empire?
Will we be the heirs of Abraham, or of Joseph?
Are we going to be a people of covenant,
outward-looking,
focussed on
bringing the blessing of God to all the nations of the earth;
or are we going to be an imperial people,
inward-looking,
focussed on defending ourselves, at all costs,
from those
things that threaten our unity or security.
The tension between these two defines the story of Israel as
we find it in scripture,
just as it
defines the history of our own Christian faith tradition.
From Joseph’s story, we learn the hard truth
that it is perfectly
possible for people of faith and vision,
to
become so focused on the threats to their “empires”,
that the
covenant promise of good news to all people
is
ignored, distorted, diluted, seduced, and co-opted.
This can happen ever so subtly,
because the
language of both
the
dream of covenant and the nightmare of empire
use
a common religious vocabulary.
It’s very easy to dress up a defence of empire
as God’s
will for God’s people.
Just look at those Christians who defend Donald Trump
as God’s
anointed leader.
But it’s too easy to throw stones across the Atlantic.
What about
us, here in the UK?
Well, we don’t exactly have a unambiguous track record,
of the
British Christianity focussing on the transformation of society,
and the
blessing of all people without distinction.
Too easily churches become centred in on themselves,
defending
their theological position against all threats,
whilst condemning the vulnerable to exclusion
or
enslavement to destructive ideologies.
The continuing theological justification of sexism,
homophobia, and racism
are evils
that have yet to be banished from our communities of faith.
Christians can be very good at distorting the vision
of a God
who is good news for all people
into something that is far more insular
and
self-serving of our own ends and purposes;
and we do it by re-writing our history.
Just as Israel re-cast Joseph in the re-telling of his
story,
so we too
can re-cast the complexities of our own histories.
Just this week I chaired a session (available on YouTube if you’re interested)
on how our
Baptist story of dissent
can be a resource and inspiration
for our
engagement with those
who are
marginalised, disempowered, and enslaved.
But we also reflected that sometimes Baptists have a
tendency to re-write their history,
to one
where we are the only people who have got their theology right,
and
where our separation from others who think differently
is
a God-ordained means of protecting our own righteousness.
Just as Joseph gets excluded from Israel’s defining mantra,
and
survives as a feel-good family drama perfect for musical theatre,
so we all face a temptation to recast the darker moments of our
stories,
excluding or
hiding the uncomfortable reality
of our complicity
in the forces of empire.
We might laud the fact that we used to be a ‘Christian
country’,
or feel pride
that Britannia used to rule the waves;
and we
might feel suitably patriotic watching the Last Night of the Proms!
But this makes it all too easy for us to forget the flip
side to our story
which is
that British history includes us being colonial monsters,
and that this
has effects that affect the world to this day.
And then, when someone points out the ongoing evils of
systemic racism,
we have the
mechanism to absolve ourselves of our cultural guilt,
pointing to the evils of others, those who lived in a
different time and by different rules,
all the while
resisting our own ongoing complicity in and benefit from such systems.
We need, as individuals, churches, and nations,
to learn to
tell our stories more honestly.
We need to resist the temptation to disconnect Joseph from
Moses,
to hide the
fact that our stories are complex and compromised.
No one church has got it all right,
no one
nation has a glorious and golden history,
none of us is immune from complicity
in actions that are destructive of others.
So what about Bloomsbury?
We like to
see ourselves as inclusive and liberal,
and we are
- to our immense credit.
I genuinely believe we are one of those congregations
that keeps
the dream of a loving God alive.
But if we are honest, we can still detect within ourselves
those
tendencies to stand in judgment
on others
who see their faith differently.
How do we feel about those who espouse exclusive theologies?
How do we
feel about those who deny the ministry of women,
or the
validity of LGBTQ inclusion?
The temptation is for us to feel superior,
to make
ourselves righteous, to the exclusion of others.
And of course, we have no moral high ground on which to
stand.
We are all
just sinners saved by grace - each one of us.
We are not Abraham to their Joseph,
we too can
be Joseph if we want to,
defending
our own empire against the forces that threaten it.
So, we need to be willing to examine ourselves,
willing to
look back at the story of our church with honesty.
As Paul put it to the Corinthian church:
Examine yourselves to see whether
you are living in the faith.
Test yourselves.
Do you not realize that Jesus
Christ is in you? (2 Cor 13.5)
Our calling is to be the heirs of a vision
not the chaplains
of the nightmare.
Our calling is to stand against the forces of exclusion and oppression,
to resist both
the powerful and petty empires of this world,
whether they
exist on the national stage or the parochial.
We are the custodians of a vision of good news for all people,
in all places,
without exception.
We need to keep awake from the seductive daydreams of power and
prestige
that lead to
the nightmares of protectionism,
and to learn to dream again in our time the ancient dream of
covenant blessing,
where God is
for all,
and where
God’s people are the means of God’s blessing.
[1]
The summary of Brueggemann’s argument that follows is drawn from http://www.ekklesiaproject.org/blog/2017/08/dreams-and-nightmares/
See also https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2410&context=leaven
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