Genesis 37:1-8, 12-28
Intro
This morning’s scripture is the beginning of the classic Sunday School story of Joseph (made famous by Andrew Lloyd Webber who added in the whole Technicolor Dreamcoat element). The story of Joseph is one that shows what can happen, not only when family discord is not addressed and ultimately dealt with, but also the backlash that can (and will) take place when someone is willing to dream beyond the here and now, dream beyond the accepted norm. Joseph (the grandchild of Issac and the great grandchild of Abraham) was the seventh son born to his father Jacob. However, because of the fact that Joseph was born when Jacob was later in his years, Jacob spoiled his son and treated him differently then the rest of his kids. Not only did Joseph receive that coat with the long, possibly color-filled arms, he was also treated with kid gloves when it came to working. Basically, his brothers were out in the fields doing the dirty job of taking care of the flocks while Joseph was allowed to spend time at home. For obvious reasons, this didn’t set all that well with Joseph’s brothers. To make matters worse, Joseph had been given the ability dream, dream about the future and what its days would hold. The story for today gives us the opening salvo of what took place as this concoction was mixed together.
Dreaming is not something that we do all that well anymore. We, much like Joseph’s brothers, are tied into the here and now and to have that normal threatened is something that leaves us feeling out of control and most of us don’t do very well when we have that sort of feeling. However, as we look at the scriptures, both this story and throughout the entirety of both the Old and New Testaments, God calls people, God calls us to dream, dream and then follow through on how the Holy Spirit is calling us to live, both as individuals and as a community of faith. The question continues to be, however, will we do it? Or will we fall into holes that we (and others) have dug? The scripture reads this way.
Genesis 37:1-8, 12-28
37 Jacob settled in the land where his father had lived as an alien, the land of Canaan. 2 This 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. 3 Now 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. 4 But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably to him.
5
Once Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more. 6 He said to them, "Listen to this dream that I dreamed. 7 There we were, binding sheaves in the field. Suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright; then your sheaves gathered around it, and bowed down to my sheaf." 8 His brothers said to him, "Are you indeed to reign over us? Are you indeed to have dominion over us?" So they hated him even more because of his dreams and his words.12
Now his brothers went to pasture their father’s flock near Shechem. 13 And Israel said to Joseph, "Are not your brothers pasturing the flock at Shechem? Come, I will send you to them." He answered, "Here I am." 14 So 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, 15 and 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." 17 The 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. 18 They saw him from a distance, and before he came near to them, they conspired to kill him. 19 They said to one another, "Here comes this dreamer. 20 Come 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." 21 But when Reuben heard it, he delivered him out of their hands, saying, "Let us not take his life." 22 Reuben 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 and restore him to his father. 23 So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the long robe with sleeves that he wore; 24 and 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. 26 Then Judah said to his brothers, "What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? 27 Come, 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. 28 When 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."7300+ (20X365=7300)"
One of the wonderful little throwaways that is included in our passage for this morning is Joseph’s age. As the narrative begins, it tells us that he was 17. I don’t know about you but when I think back to who I was when I was 17, well, let’s just say that I am grateful to say that I have grown up… a whole lot. Obviously there are parts of my personality that haven’t grown up as much as others (you can ask Jen, she let you know that I’m telling the truth on that one), but who I am today, as opposed to who I was back then, are almost night and day.
So think about who you were when you were seventeen, and then realize that it is that sort of mentality that is offering up the dream that we heard about this morning. A seventeen year old: cocky, spoiled, not having developed a verbal check valve in order to make what he saying somehow more palatable for his older brothers. You throw all that in a pot, and mix it with the fact that he was willing to allow his dreams to become a conduit through which the Spirit of God was speaking and what you have is a recipe for disaster. Joseph was willing to dream. As we can tell from his brothers’ reactions ("they hated him even more because of his dreams", and "here comes the dreamer, let’s kill him"), his brothers weren’t all that ready to listen.
I think that’s one of the big lessons that we pick up from this story, especially as we think about the story from an allegorical perspective: dreaming through the Holy Spirit is not something that goes over all that well in the world. Dreaming scares us and there are many days when we want to throw the dreams of others (even ourselves), right into a hole where we won’t have to hear about them again, let alone consider how God might be working through that dream to tell us what is on the horizon.
Because here’s the thing, just because Joseph’s brothers didn’t want to hear about the dream that their spoiled brother had, didn’t mean that the truth behind it disappeared, even after they had thrown him into a hole and then sold him into slavery. It took 20 years for Joseph’s dream to come to fruition (that’s 7300 plus days when we parse it out), but it still came to pass.
God calls us to dream through the Holy Spirit so that we are to know where we are going. We can pretend that the way things are today is the way things will be for the next five, ten, twenty years, but we all know that we cannot, and for that matter should not, freeze frame any particular time in history and act as if, "well, that’s it. That’s as far as we need to go." If we do that, then time will pass us by and down the road we will end up looking around wondering why we’re irrelevant. There are way too many churches who stopped dreaming, or at the very least put their dreams into a hole to act as if they didn’t exist. Ten, twenty, thirty years later, they’re looking around their empty sanctuaries reminiscing about the good old days, and wondering how they can get back there. They stopped dreaming! They stopped dreaming and wanted to hold their ground instead of moving forward. They stopped dreaming and thought they could handle their futures better then the creator of the universe could.
As a pastor, as your pastor, I don’t want to do that; I don’t want us to do that. This past program year (07-08), has felt like one of those years where we got stuck in, or distracted by, the things of the world as opposed to dreaming about the things of God. If nothing else, I’ll put myself up on the block and say that I got stuck and distracted. This truth really got shoved into my face as I’ve dealt with this passage for the last six days.
So in order to try and get out of that hole, I started to put a list together of the dreams that have been put upon my heart for our congregation. I wrote it, revised it, had the pastoral staff look it over and hack it up before putting back together, and then started to follow through so that the dreams through the Holy Spirit develop into the next brick in the Kingdom of God.
Some of these dreams are ones that I’ve mentioned before. Others may seem totally new. Some cost a ‘little bit’ of money. Others just need the right people following the Spirit of God in order to come into creation. Whatever the case may be, they’ve been hanging on my heart and in my head and from everything that I can tell, these feel to be of God.
When I got to this point of the sermon writing process on Friday I started to debate myself as to whether or not I should talk about any of the dreams that I felt. I literally talked with Des about it.
Then I thought about the scripture and the point that was trying to be made through me: not only is God calling us to dream but God is calling us to share these dreams in the midst of the family of faith. So, while I’m not going to ‘bore’ you with all 14 dreams (keep a lookout for your September Kerk for the full list!), I am going to tease you with a few of them.
In no particular order: there should be an overnight off-campus congregational retreat and we should have it before the calendar year 2009 (that’s next year!) ends. It will bring us together and it will bring us together in the presence of God.
We should develop and implement Daily Devotional that is written by our congregation and sent through email to the greater family of faith. This is a wonderful way to begin to tell our individual stories and through those stories support each other as we live in a world that says we are crazy for believing in God, let alone believing in a God that loves us so much that he sent His only son to die for us.
We should help Red Hook to host a youth Workcamp mission trip by the summer of 2011. When I got back from Delaware a few weeks ago I was all the more convinced that we should do this. The impact that 400 kids and adults would have on the greater Red Hook area (and by that I mean Rhinebeck, Germantown, Milan, and Tivoli (just to mention a few!)) would be enormous, not only in terms of the homes that would be repaired, but in allowing our community to know that they are not alone and that God does love them and that love can be experienced in and through a faith-filled life.
We should identify appropriate Office for the Aging programming for our space (both in terms of size and availability) and invite them to start new sessions as soon as possible. The ways that the exercise and brain games groups have grown is wonderful. But I think its just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how God is calling us to serve our neighbors, our brothers and sisters, in that demographic.
Lastly, and in a completely different direction, we should begin to videotape our worship services for congregational use, for use on PANDA, maybe even for use on the web. We live in a visual world and as people called to share the message of Christ with the world we need to be willing and able to evangelize in this way.
As I said, it’s just five of the fourteen and I have no doubts that there are many more beyond that (I can think of the Guatemala mission trip as a current example of a dream that was put upon the heart of the Walrath family and because they were willing to articulate that dream a whole lot of people were served in the name of Jesus Christ). So as we get closer to September when everyone starts to return from their various summertime adventures, I’m going to start to put this dreaming list out there for all of us to ruminate upon. Some may be removed. Others will be added. But as we start to get it together I’m going to make sure that it is put in a place where we can see how we’re doing, not only at articulating the dreams, but stepping out and allowing those dreams to become reality.
Remembering the past is important. Celebrating the present is wonderful. Dreaming about and stepping into the future that God has for us is imperative. If we don’t we will end up languishing in irrelevance, if not dying. Even if it takes 7300 days for those dreams to come to fruition, we need to be willing to have those dreams, articulate them with one another, and the courage to step out in faith knowing that in God all things are possible.
I’m ready to dream and as you can tell, I already am. Beyond that, I’m feeling ready to follow through and begin to step out in faith and implement those dreams. How about you? We may never see the culmination of some (or maybe even any) of those dreams, but I have confidence that in God’s time and in God’s way, those dreams will flower as they were intended. Let’s take those dreams out of the various holes that we stick them into, and start stepping forward in faith.
After Sermon Prayer
God, You have called us to dream, dream in such a way that Your will might be done. We pray that each of might be able to do that very thing so that we might move beyond the holes that we get placed, and we place ourselves in. Help us to trust in You, in all that we are so that Your will might be done through the dreams that You have placed upon our hearts. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.