Epiphany 7c - "Joseph All the Time"

Genesis 45:3-11 & 15

You may have seen the musical but do you know the story of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat?  It’s currently playing at Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre.  I’ve seen it countless times on TV, in community theatre productions and, of course with Donny Osmond, and will probably see it again because I know someone in the cast.

I love it for its memorable songs that one comes out of the theatre so embedded in your brain that you find yourself singing them all the way home in the car and in the shower for weeks to come.

In today’s first reading from Genesis, we’re coming in at the last act of what has been a very great story.  We are at the moment where, as they saw in Broadway musicals, the 11 o’clock number is about to be sung.  That’s the song that doesn’t quite end the show but is big and broad and leads to the conclusion which is usually full of love, hugs, tears, and forgiveness. 

But if we read the story of Joseph from the very beginning, we discover it is not “any dream will do” but more like a nightmare.  Jacob and his sons (All of them!) are more like the Kardashian’s, or the Corleone’s, or any member of the Survivor Series and serve as a stunning reminder that the forgiveness that comes at the end is hard won at best.

It is another one of those reminders to people who trumpet the virtues of “Biblical Family Values” that in the real bible those values can be shady at best.

Even the play reminds us of why Joseph was his father’s favourite when his father Jacob sings.  “Joseph's mother, she was quite my favorite wife I never really loved another all my life And Joseph was my joy because He reminded me of her.”

As any parent knows that is a recipe for disaster.  It is one thing to love one child more than another but, if that is the case, it should be a secret that is well kept rather than trumpeted for all the world to see.

Father Jacob can’t contain himself and outfits his beloved boy with what may not have been exactly a “coat of many colours”1 as the King James Bible described it but as one Hebrew translation it is a “tunic reaching to palms and soles.”2

Tunic or technicolour coat, it doesn’t matter because in it Joseph looked smashing.  However, to his brothers who were running around in T-shirts and dirty jeans it shouted loud and clear that “their labour was in the fields, in the heat,” while “Joseph was established in the house with those long sleeves, in a position of power.”3  As Joseph would sing in the play: “When I got to try it on I knew my sheepskin days were gone.”

Now its one thing to have a great job indoors while your brothers are toiling in the noonday sun but it is quite another to tell them about a dream you had that one day they would all be bowing down to you. 

Jacob made a huge mistake by singling out Joseph as his favourite and Joseph makes an even bigger mistake by rubbing his father’s favouritism in his brother’s faces.

So, in this wonderful biblical story of family values they do what most levelheaded brothers do.  They try to kill him.  It’s not a “I’m going to kill him someday.” that every sibling has said or shrieked.  This is a real plot.  

Cooler heads prevail and instead of killing their brother they sell him into slavery.  But, as we say, the cover-up is worse than the crime and so they break father Jacob’s heart by killing a goat, a scapegoat that could be every single one of them and allowing their father to believe that his son had been slain by a wild beast.

The boys didn’t tell Jacob that.  They just allowed him to believe it.  Even though they know otherwise.  Even though they knew and could see that what they had done had broken their father’s heart they refuse to accept responsibility.  

“It’s not my fault!” they claim even though they know, they must know, that all the pain and sorrow has been caused by them.  Maybe they don’t care about Joseph at all. They certainly don’t care about their father’s feelings.  They only care about themselves and saving their own skin.

For Joseph things are going better than be expected as through his skill at managing households, like he did back home, he is put in charge of Pharoah’s entire palace.   

Then it all comes crashing down for him when he is falsely accused by no less that the Pharaoh’s wife of being a little too “handsy” with her and finds himself landing in the clink. 

There, in the deep darkness of his jail cell, things begin to brighten as Joseph’s ability to interpret dreams finds him standing once again in Pharaoh’s presence interpreting his dreams as predicting record harvests followed by a record famine. 

The change in Joseph is seen as he begins to see his abilities as gifts from God and not of his own making.  

This newfound insight will be challenged as never before when his brothers show up at his doorstep and, as predicted long ago, bow down before him begging for food. “Grovel, grovel, cringe, bow, stoop, fall. Worship, worship, beg, kneel, sponge, crawl.” they sing in the play.

He has been wise and virtuous with others, but what about with his family?  Family can bring out the worse in us.  Joseph must work out the complex feelings he has after his brothers’ profound betrayal of him.4

What will he do to them?  After all, as he says in they play, “they tried fratricide.”

Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann has written wisely and well of what is happening.

Every person and every family knows about these extremities of pain and estrangement in which humanness is at issue.  Where yearning and hurt, deception and grief, hope and ruthlessness come together is where this special family moves toward dream fulfilment.5

We come in at the magic moment. It comes in the very first words of today’s reading.  “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?”6

Both the pathos and hope of the whole story are packed into these words.  

At the heart of both the pain and redemption in this text lie core issues that concern every human in every time, identity, and relationship.  In the episodes leading up to this text, he has toyed with his brothers, and cruelly so, but now he makes a choice that changes everything: he forgives them.  Even within a family system loaded with manipulation, jealousy, and fear, a single person within the system has the power to transform relationships, and even the system itself, through an unexpected act of reconciliation.7

In the play we are at the big finish.  There is singing, and dancing, and hugging, and weeping before it all ends on a big major chord at the end.

That’s why we love plays!  All the tension, resolution, and forgiveness is accomplished in the case of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat” less than an hour-and-a-half.  

“That’s one of the hardest qualities to capture when we consider scripture.” wrote Liz Goodman in a Christian Century article. “All the stories of the Bible take time, more time than we moderns might realize. In fact, I think one of the greatest errors people of faith commit ... is to bring our immense impatience to the question.”8

Forgiveness takes time. Reconciliation takes effort.  And in a time where, in the words of the great theologian and “Saturday Night Live” alumi John Mulaney, “It seems like everyone, everywhere, is super mad about everything, all the time” we may not even see those traits as possibilities.  

But as followers of Jesus, it is still our cause. Not to be push-overs.  Not to allow ourselves to be trampled upon by those people who are angry all the time and spend most of their days and nights thinking about how to exploit those who have less than them in money and power but to stand tall and say, “This is not our way!  This is not the way the world works! This is not what our faith tells us we should be doing!”

We still hope for a world where people are forgiving, and kind, and generous knowing that the time is not yet but still working for a time when what is not yet, will be.

Or, as Joseph will sing at the conclusion of “Dreamcoat” “The light is dimming, and the dream is too. The world and I, we are still waiting. Still hesitating.” Waiting for the dream of Joseph and Jesus to come true. 

May that day come soon.

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1.  Genesis 37:3. (KJV) [KJV=The King James Version]
 

2. Genesis 37:3. (OJB) [OJB=The Orthodox Jewish Bible]

3. James D. Howell, “What can we say come August 20? 11th after Pentecost,” James Howell's Weekly Peaching Notions (blog) (Myers Park United Methodist Church, August 7, 2017), http://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/2017/07/what-can-we-say-come-august-20-11th.html.

4. Brent A Strawn, Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, vol. 1 (Louisville: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2018): pp. 255-257.

5. Walter Brueggemann, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1982). p. 342.

6. Genesis 45:4b (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]

7.    Stacey  Simpson Duke, Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, vol. 1 (Louisville, KY: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2018), 258.

8. Liz Goodman, “Joseph’s Whole Story (Genesis 45:3-11, 15),” The Christian Century, February 18, 2022, https://www.christiancentury.org/blog-post/sundays-coming/joseph-s-whole-story-genesis-453-11-15?