How We're Built

Genesis 37:2-11, 18-28

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. 9 He had another dream, and told it to his brothers, saying, "Look, I have had another dream: the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me." 10 But when he told it to his father and to his brothers, his father rebuked him, and said to him, "What kind of dream is this that you have had? Shall we indeed come, I and your mother and your brothers, and bow to the ground before you?" 11 So his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind.

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.

This Joseph story is fascinating. It is such a human story. It’s the story of every dysfunctional family - the story of every family, if we’re being honest. It’s the story of a bunch of almosts - people who are almost devils - people who are almost heroes.

We only get part of the story in this lectionary text. The full story of Joseph and his brothers encompasses the last thirteen or so chapters in Genesis. Interestingly, this text isn’t interrupted from other sources very much. Most scholars argue that the book of Genesis is made up of three sources: the Yahwist, the Elohist, and the Priestly. But this Joseph narrative, or novel, as it is sometimes called, is not a collection of these sources, nor does it have many interruptions from the Priestly, or Elohist sources. And some scholars even contend that this story comes from a source that is older than the Yahwist. It’s one long story, the longest continual story in all of Genesis. And an ancient one at that. So preaching on just part of the story has its challenges, and I encourage you all to crack open your Bibles and read the story in its entirety.

But there is a reason, I think, for us to focus on just one part of the story. This is the part of the story of Joseph that is all ugly. It’s all of the rising action with none of the conclusion. And the rising action continues even past our reading for today, complicating the plot and developing the characters all the way through the story’s arch. At this point in the story, there isn’t a single blameless person. No one is the hero here.

Jacob, the chosen father of the twelve tribes of Israel has manipulated his way into this birthright from the very beginning. In this part of the story, this chosen father of the Twelve Tribes of Israel spoils the child of his favorite wife, and doesn’t hide it from his other sons. He gives Joseph a long coat with sleeves, maybe multi-colored, but the Hebrew here is more accurately “sleeves.” It’s a coat made for a prince, a coat that would completely inhibit any physical work that needed to be done in the fields or at home.

And Joseph revels in his father’s treatment. He’s one of those stereotypical punk teenagers who knows all the answers and has it all figured out. He flaunts his dreams of future domination over his brothers, and has no problem tattling on his brothers when they step out of line.

And his brothers. His brothers are jealous bullies who beat up on Joseph, leave him for dead, sell him as a slave, and then lie to their father about it.

Even Reuben, the oldest, who sees the sin in all of this, who wants to save Joseph, doesn’t have the guts to do it.

And Judah restrains his brothers from killing Joseph, not because he cares for him, but because he knows that the bloodguilt that would result would haunt him and his family for the rest of their lives.

There isn’t any blameless person in this whole story:

But these are the people that God makes. This is you and me.

Find yourself in this story.

You could be a villain:

Are you Jacob, the one who has put his hopes on only one thing, neglecting your other responsibilities, blind to others who want and need your love? Blind to those who give you love?

Are you Joseph, maybe a little naive, flaunting your gifts and preaching your ideas at the expense of others?

Or are you one of the brothers, willing to sacrifice the life of another because you feel threatened by their potential?

You could be a victim:

Are you Jacob? Has the one thing you love most in the world been taken from you?

Are you Joseph? Have you been betrayed and hurt by those who you were supposed to trust the most?

Or are you one of the brothers, whose gifts have always seemed to be overlooked because someone else walks by with a sparkling coat and a flashy smile?

There isn’t a blameless person in this story. And there isn’t one person who is not a victim. Isn’t that like all of us?

Interestingly, God isn’t mentioned in this part of the story once. - Later, the narrator attributes some of the actions and outcomes to God, but the greatest reflection on God’s actions doesn’t come until the end of the Joseph narrative, and only in hindsight. It is after all the complications and actions of our protagonists, after all the deceit and corruption and pain has past, that God is finally given any credit for anything that has happened.

And yet, here it is, in our Bible. A story that somehow is supposed to point us towards God, or teach us something about God, and it doesn’t have God’s direct actions in it at all.

So the challenge is, can we see the work of God in the middle of the story, when things aren’t finished, when God seems absent? When the characters - even ourselves - are both villains and victims? Where is God when you feel like you’ve been thrown into a dry well? And when you feel guilty for throwing someone else into that well? Where is God when you’re in the middle of your story and there’s no evidence anywhere that God even cares? Where’s God when you’re in the middle of the storm?

Peter can do this, see God in the heart of the chaos. Sort of. He says in the middle of the storm, smack dab in the middle of Matthew’s Jesus narrative, in the midst of his fear and disbelief, “Hey, if it is You, in the middle of this crazy storm, in the middle of the sea, in the middle of all of this chaos, then I want to be with you.” And Jesus says, “c’mon.”

And when he forgets that Jesus is out there, when he sees the waves crashing all around him, when he feels like he is going to be swallowed up by all that’s around him, when he’s smack dab in the middle of that raging sea, that’s when he begins to sink. So even someone like Peter, who has Jesus right there, performing miracles right in front of him, even Peter still sinks.

So there’s Joseph, dumped in the cistern, sitting in that giant pit used to collect water for the dry season, and it’s empty. There is no water for the future. The land is dry. His brothers have abandoned him. You’re not going to last long exposed out there in the desert, alone. It’s a hopeless situation, and a prediction of how things will be in the land for a long time to come.

Both the Joseph narrative and the story of Peter on the water give us the opportunity to ask the hard questions. Where is God when the land is dry and your support system is gone? When the wind is against you? When you look for God but only see a ghost?

Where is God when you’re being sold out to insurance companies, and mortgage companies, and political systems that can’t seem to get their acts together in order to avoid a complete financial meltdown? Or when you’ve lost your job or your spouse or you’ve been the one to have left someone alone in the desert?

And yet...

Joseph dreams dreams he’s not “supposed” to dream. Crazy dreams that upend all of society’s expectations. Dreams that disrupt the balance. He’s the youngest; he’s not supposed to be the greatest. He’s supposed to get the dregs of his father’s inheritance, not become richer and more powerful than even his own father.

But in order to understand the impact of these dreams though, we need to rewind our psychology to a time before Freud, before Realism, before Modernity. Dreams in the time of the formation of the Hebrew Bible were more than just fantasies of the subconscious. Dreams were portents of the future, they came from God, and they had power.

Joseph predicts his rise to power. He predicts that his brothers and father and mother are all going to need him to save the day. He predicts that his life is going to be different from what it is now.

And we have that seed of those dreams throughout the rest of the story. It’s the promise that God won’t leave us, even when we’re in the pit, even when we’ve thrown someone else in the pit, even when we’ve cursed God and found that what we’ve loved has been torn to shreds. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s something. And the dreams don’t really come to fruition in the way that Joseph expects. The way that they happen is far more humbling, far more life-changing, and far more transformative than any of our characters realize at the time that Joseph reports them.

But the fact that there were dreams, that there is a promise, that is what Joseph and his brothers and Jacob have to hold on to - even when they think Joseph is dead or sold off as a slave. Even when they no longer believe in the dream. Even when they never believed the dream in the first place. The dream is still there.

Those with great faith aren’t those who are sure of themselves or of the presence of God, or are certain things will turn out ok in the end. Those with great faith are the ones who can sit in the pit, sink into the water, and still stretch out their hands to God, or maybe just think about stretching their hands, or even wish they had the strength to stretch out to God. Those who stretch out their hands to God may not even be sure that someone’s going to be there to grab it on the other end. They don’t know if God is going to make everything right again. If you shout down to them as they sit at the bottom of that well and ask them if they even believe in God, they may not even answer. It’s a faith so deep in their bones that they may not even know that it’s there.

It’s like a reflex - something you can’t control anymore because you’ve practiced it and practiced it. It’s a faith that runs so deep that if one day you began to question everything you thought you knew, if you started to think that your faith is just a hoax of incredible proportions, you’d still live it out anyway because that’s just how you’re built.

Like Mother Teresa, who, even though, at the end of her life, questioned everything that her life had been based on, she still got up in the morning and prayed to a God she questioned existed. The believing of what is truth vs. what is false, the modern idea of “facts” versus “lies” - even though these are important questions - isn’t the faith; the persistence is. The shouting out to God even when you doubt God’s existence - that’s the faith. The remembering that there was once a dream - maybe it came long ago, and maybe you only remember it in pieces and whispers - that’s the faith. That’s the something deep inside of Peter, deep down in his bones that reminds him to call out, to reach up, to grab a hand.

And that IS how we’re built.

We are made by the creator, God’s very self. We have the essence of who God is deep in our flesh. When we breathe, we are in communion with God. When we enjoy a great meal with good friends, we are enjoying it with God. When we are hungry, or lost, or when we’ve just thrown our brother into a dry cistern, God is there. This is the beautiful and terrifying thing about the incarnation.

‘Cause when we throw our brother down there, we realize we’ve thrown God down there too. And when we’re the ones down there, when we’re in despair, hungering and thirsting for a God who only seems silent and distant, God’s there, too.

That’s why we come to church, why we listen to these stories. We come to be reminded that we’re not alone. We come to be reminded that the dreams were dreamt, the histories happened, that the God whose presence was felt two thousand years ago, and even further back in history, can still be felt today. We are both villains and victims, but we’re dreamers, too. And just remembering this, just remembering that there was a dream once, even when we feel so far away from it now, even if we can’t believe what it claims, we have enough to hold on to, to stretch out for. God has built us to have faith, deep in our very bones.

May we always remember that that’s how we’re built.

Thanks be to God.

Mustard Trees

³¹He put before them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; ³²it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches."

³³He told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened."

^{Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52}

⁴⁴"The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

⁴⁵"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; ⁴⁶on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

⁴⁷"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind;⁴⁸when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. ⁴⁹So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous ⁵⁰and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

⁵¹"Have you understood all this?" They answered, "Yes." ⁵²And he said to them, "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old."

So every Spring, Dan and I continue our crusade to eliminate our need to do any sort of lawn care. Well, it doesn’t really start out that way. What really happens is that after a long winter of gray skies and frozen pizzas, we get this itch to plant things, to see stuff grow, to just walk out our back door and pick fresh raspberries and sun-warmed tomatoes - even eat them right off the vine. So each year, we set our sights on adding to our garden. Every May we move the t-posts and stretch out the chicken wire a little further to accommodate just one more tomato plant, and then just one row of asparagus, and then, heck, while we’re at it, let’s try blueberry bushes this year. Needless to say, we’re running out of lawn. The three strawberry plants we planted two years ago have now taken up the whole flower bed and wandered out past our fence and into the front yard. The raspberry bush we planted last year has tripled in size and sprouted up three new extensions. And we really only wanted one zucchini plant and one yellow squash, but when they come in packs of four, well, you might as well plant them all and see what happens. Well, what happened is that we’ve got a whole freezer full of shredded zucchini, and I’ve tried so many different yellow squash recipes that I’m thinking about trying yellow squash sorbet next.

But here’s the thing - we really don’t spend that much time gardening. Neither of us would describe our thumbs with any shade of green. We stick the plants in the ground, throw some worm castings over it, give it some water now and then, and get back to reading about Process Womanist Theology, or the “shared cultural milieu of the Gospel of John and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” and appeasing our toddler’s newest fascination with trucks and vacuum cleaners. We just let them go, and yet, and yet, they still take over our lawn and fill our countertops and freezer with produce. It’s overwhelming, really, but in a fun, melting-ice-cream-all-over-your-fingertips sort of way. And I’m sure our neighbors think we’re crazy, and maybe shake their heads a little at our tiny farm in the city.

And that’s sorta how I feel when I try to thread all of these parables together in today’s Scripture reading. The images and their implications are overwhelming, maybe even a little overgrown, and so much can be said about each parable individually that we could be here all day. But don’t worry, I’m just a seminary student, so I won’t make us do that.

Instead, what I want us to do is to hover over these stories, and see how they are all planted in the same field, how, when these parables are sewn together, or sown together, they make a kind of narrative, a pattern of responding to the kingdom of God that is both present here, now, as well as in the future. I want us to see the narrative arch that the writer of the Gospel of Matthew presents to us when we thread these parables together. The kingdom starts small, invisibly even, but when we see it, or when we know it’s there even if we don’t see it, our response should be one of both joy and discernment.

This list of parables is Jesus’ response to the disciples’ confusion. They don’t get why more people aren’t coming on board with Jesus’ message. As good, observant Jews, they’ve been waiting and looking for the Kingdom to come their whole lives, and now that it’s here, now that they see it and feel it and can almost taste it through their encounters with Jesus, they don’t understand why everyone else isn’t seeing it too. They’re trying to juxtapose two incongruous facts: the “smallness” of Jesus and the disciples’ ministry and the “great” expectations of the future - the fact that a scrubby son of a Jewish carpenter and his mentally unstable cousin - along with twelve or so equally scrubby fishermen, tax collectors, and joe six packs - are going to be the beginning of this paradigm shift that centuries of Jews have been waiting for. This collection of parables is an invitation to contemplate these two things - our present circumstances as well as our hopes and expectations of a future that God has promised us.

And of course, Jesus explains things in a way that turns everything on its head and, if we’re paying attention, completely confounds us. The kingdom of heaven isn’t going to come in a grand whirlwind or from a lightning bolt from the sky. No, Jesus tells us, the kingdom starts small. Its beginnings look insignificant, and maybe even a little precarious - like a mustard seed, like leaven. Through these series of parables, a vital truth is revealed about God’s kingdom - that, to quote Dale Allison, “a humble beginning and secret presence are not inconsistent with a great and glorious destiny.”

So, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field,” and “The Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour.” When it comes to gardening, or making bread, or the beginnings of the coming of the Kingdom, it’s easy to screw it up. So much can so easily go wrong. That’s why we place ten or even fifteen tiny seeds into the peat pots in the spring, hoping to get one good tomato plant out of it. And if your water is too cold, your yeast won’t activate. But if it’s too hot, the yeast will die. If you accidentally forget about your sourdough starter, and find it dried up and crumbled in the back of your refrigerator, you have to start all over again. Someone can tell you that you don’t belong in a church, or that you’re not good enough, or that you’re not “spiritual” enough, and the hopes of the Kingdom could just whither on the vine.

And yet. In each of us is a part of the divine spark that sent entire planets into being. The end is held in the beginning. A little bit of the old leaven is needed to make new dough. And all the potential, the entire future of a tree is held within that one seed. Again, our buddy Dale Allison writes, “For Matthew, the kingdom exists now; and it is an ‘eschatological sphere of salvation, which breaks in, makes a small, unpretentious beginning, miraculously swells, and increases; as a divine “field of energy” it extends and expands ever farther.”

But let’s not forget about the scandal of it all. This is Jesus after all. Jesus not only takes the expectations of the Disciples and turns them upside down, but he completely reverses the clearly defined codes and limits of Jewish life. But for us to understand this, we need a little bit of a botany lesson as well as a little bit of an Old Testament lesson. According to Jewish codes in Leviticus, “You shall not sow your field with two different kinds of seed.” Seeds need to be properly separated. You don’t mix the wheat with the corn, or the barley with the oats. But the thing is, it is the nature of the mustard seed to spread and take over, to cross boundaries, to do what my raspberry bush is doing now by fraternizing with the tomatoes. If you tried to plant one nice, neat little row of mustard bushes, they’re so resilient and persistent, they’ll soon spread and take over the whole field. So hold that idea in one hand.

And in the other hand, consider that in the Old Testament, it’s trees, not bushes, that are symbols for God’s reign on earth. The book of Daniel, the book of Ezekiel and even Psalm 104 all refer to giant trees where birds find shelter and places to nest. “A tree in whose shade animals or birds find shelter and sustenance is an Old Testament image of a powerful kingdom sheltering the nations.” But Jesus changes this up. He says that this planted mustard seed “is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown, it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” Mustard plants don’t really become trees. According to Pliny the Elder, an ancient Roman botanist who wrote a Natural History - a sort of ancient encyclopedia of nature - most mustard bushes grow to be about four feet tall. These are bushes, not trees. So why does the writer of Matthew choose to call it a tree? Maybe Matthew was a horrible botanist who didn’t know his ragweed from his sea weed. Or, maybe, and perhaps more likely, Matthew, an ever careful writer, chooses the word “tree” on purpose, to emphasize that this is something that we’ve never seen before, something beyond our expectations. God’s kingdom is one made up of mustard trees. As Bernard Brandon Scott calls it, these trees are an “unnatural malformity of mythical botany.” And in these overgrown bush/tree hybrids is “recognition that God’s mighty words [and works] are among the unclean and insignificant.” It’s not a giant cedar or a majestic oak, but the tiny shoot of Jesse, a lowly carpenter’s son, a torn up man hanging on a cross of rotting wood, or a bush that barely grows four feet high - these are the ways the kingdom of heaven comes to earth.

The planting and growth of a mustard seed is a scandal on many levels. It’s a scandal for planting this seed where it will certainly “corrupt” the other fields, and a scandal for becoming a tree - something completely unexpected for such a humble plant. Or, think of the scandal, the shock on the faces of the disciples when Jesus suggests that a woman is one who can facilitate the coming of the kingdom in the simple and domestic realm of baking bread.

Jesus again restructures, adjusts, and sometimes even obliterates our expectations. The kingdom is like a seed, or the leaven needed for bread. We want the quick fix, the immediate answer, or if we have to wait, we at least want something majestic and lasting and big. But this isn’t how things work, says Jesus. The kingdom must be planted, and when planted, it is buried, it is hidden, and then it must germinate and grow. All of the potential of the kingdom is in that tiny seed, or contained in that yeast, and that potential is huge, life-changing, unexpected and welcoming.

The coming of the kingdom begins with a hidden presence, and it’s first growth is vulnerable, small, weak even...maybe even threatening.

But Jesus says to the Disciples - give everything you have for it anyway. And so we continue with our narrative of parables. If the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast tell us that the kingdom of God has humble, even scandalous beginnings, the parables of the treasure and the great pearl tell us to give up all that we have to attain it - even if it seems strange, or radical, or ridiculous or even a bit scandalous.

Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” Or again, it’s like “a merchant in search of pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all he had and bought it.” The value of the kingdom goes hand in hand with our appropriate response. Give everything you have, because it is worth everything you have.

And I can hear you all, right now. You’re thinking, “whoa, whoa, Jenn - I go to Sixth, I’m a Presbyterian, one of the “frozen chosen,” when did you get all Fundagelical on us?” Give up everything? That’s just irresponsible. That’s not only crazy; that’s just dumb.

But let’s stop and think about this for a minute. Don’t we do this all the time? Don’t we make decisions about what we’re going to give our lives to and what we aren’t? This is where our parable of the nets comes in. The kingdom of heaven “is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad.”

Don’t we give our whole lives to our children? Or, wouldn’t we, if we were asked to? Don’t our jobs demand this from us, even if we resist? Don’t we watch television commercials and think, “If I just had that new car, or bought that kind of mayonnaise, or used that kind of deodorant or had that degree everything in my life would be so much better?” The question is, how do we sort through what is life-giving and what needs to be thrown out? Does what you give your whole self to give you your self back? Does it give back more? What is worth giving of our whole selves? And what isn’t? Jesus tells us it’s the stuff that surprises us, the stuff that seems a little bit scandalous, the stuff that seems hidden that will give us our lives back, and ultimately, bring the kingdom of heaven here on earth.

Jesus tells us that when we find that hidden, vulnerable, pervasive thing that brings in the kingdom, it’s worth everything we have, and that means making some choices. That means that when we gather up everything that life has to offer into our nets, we’re going to have to throw out the things that don’t bring about the kingdom. We must sort through what gives us life and what takes life from us.

Jesus says, the Kingdom is worth it, even when it’s hidden, even when it looks like a weed, even when it needs to be carefully tended to, even when it disrupts our neat little rows of order, control and routine. And when we give everything we have, we don’t leave with nothing. We leave with our arms full of life, nets full of fish, loaves and loaves of bread, and acres of mustard trees. And more than that. We leave with an idea of what we thought was impossible is now possible - bushes become trees, fields become treasure, a speck of dirt becomes a pearl.

Thanks be to God.