Pictures from the Family Album: the Coat of Many Colors Richmond s First Baptist Church, August 13, 2017 The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28 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. 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. Let me begin by saying thank you to Linda McKinnish Bridges, the new president of the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, who preached last Sunday while I was recovering from the overwhelming joy of doing my youngest daughter s wedding in the mountains of North Carolina. If you ve seen the movie Father of the Bride that was me, sitting there in a pile of confetti when it was all over and thanking God for every minute. By 8:30 the next morning, I was actually able to tune in to the live webcast from Richmond s First Baptist Church, and what I saw and heard was wonderful. Linda is an outstanding preacher. But she chose to preach from the New Testament instead of the Old, which was her prerogative. And the New Testament is her area of specialty, so it makes sense. But it means that I ve got some catching up to do in our summer sermon series. We ve skipped over a few pages in the family photo album. We skipped that page where Jacob slips away from his father-in-law, Laban, taking his wives and children, his flocks and herds, with him. When Laban catches up to him he is furious and demands to know what Jacob is up to. Jacob delivers one of the most memorable speeches in the Old Testament, telling Laban that he has served him faithfully for twenty years even though Laban has cheated him time after time. He is only taking what is his, but he is taking it, by Yahweh! 1
And then he and Laban set up a pile of stones and call it Mizpah. Laban promises not to cross over to Jacob s side and Jacob promises not to cross over to Laban s. And then they spit on their palms and shake hands and Laban says, May the Lord watch between me and thee while we are absent one from another. It s not a blessing, it s a threat. We skipped the page where Jacob hears that Esau is coming to meet him, where he sends his family over to the other side of the Jabbok and then camps out alone, waiting. Sometime in the night a man leaps on him but it s not Esau. Jacob doesn t know who it is. Some people have thought it might be Jacob s own guilty conscience that leaps on him for all he has done. At any rate, the two of them wrestle all through the night and just before dawn the man says, Let me go. Not until you bless me, Jacob grunts. The man asks him his name and when Jacob tells him he says, From now on you will be known as Israel, the one who strives with God and prevails. And that s when Jacob realizes who he has been wrestling with. He limps away from that place a different man. We skipped the page where Jacob and Esau are reunited for the first time in twenty years, but Lynn Turner did a beautiful job of telling that story a few weeks ago, and talking about their surprising reconciliation, where Esau threw his arms around Jacob and hugged him, and Jacob said, To see your face is like seeing the face of God. Because what he saw on that face was grace the last thing in the world he was expecting. We skipped the page where the Prince of Shechem falls in love with Dinah, Jacob s daughter, and takes her without asking. Her brothers are furious, and 2
when Shechem tries to make things right by offering to marry her they say, Not until every man among you is circumcised. Shechem complies, but three days later, when they are all recovering from that painful minor surgery, two of Jacob s sons sneak in and kill every man in the village. What have you done? Jacob wails. Everyone who hears about this will want to kill us! But they say, No woman should be treated like he treated our sister. We skipped the page where Rachel, Jacob s beloved, gives birth to her second son on the road to Bethlehem. It s a difficult delivery, and afterward, as she is dying, Rachel calls the boy Ben-Oni, son of my sorrow, but when Jacob takes him from her arms later he says, through tears, No, his name shall be Benjamin, son of my right hand. And he buries Rachel right there where she died, and sets up a pillar, and to this day if you visit the Holy Land you can visit Rachel s Tomb. And so we arrive at today s reading from Genesis 37, which begins with the news that when Jacob settled again in the land of Canaan Joseph, the firstborn son of his beloved Rachel, was 17 years old (and let me tell you, there is no one who knows more than a 17- year-old boy, or at least no one who thinks he knows more). Joseph was Jacob s favorite, and Jacob wasn t afraid to show it. He gave Joseph a beautiful robe to wear, a coat of many colors. At least, that s the way it says it in my Bible. Some of the Hebrew scholars will argue that it wasn t a coat of many colors, it was a coat with long sleeves. But somehow, for me, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat just sounds better than Joseph and the Amazing Extra-Long Sleeve Coat. Right? He gave Joseph that coat and Joseph put it on and paraded around in front of his brothers and how do you 3
think that made them feel? I ve said it before: When parents play favorites, the results are rarely favorable. Joseph s brothers hated him. But then Joseph began to have these dreams. In one of his dreams he and his brothers were out binding sheaves in the field when suddenly Joseph s sheaf stood up, straight and tall, and his brothers sheaves bowed down to his. Bad enough to have a dream like that, even worse to tell your brothers about it at breakfast the next morning. They said, What? Are we going to bow down to you? And they hated him even more. But then he had another dream, and in this dream the sun and the moon and eleven stars bowed down to him. When he told them about that one his father said, What? Will I, and your mother, and all your brothers bow down to you? He was secretly pleased by the idea, but Joseph s brothers hated him even more than before. That s a lot of hate. They began to look for any opportunity to get away from Joseph. They took their father s flocks to Shechem to pasture them there, but after a few days Jacob said to Joseph, Go to your brothers and see how things are going in Shechem. Joseph was an obedient son. He said, Yes, Father, and off he went, but when he got to Shechem he found that his brothers had moved on to Dothan. He followed them there. But as he was coming across the field his brothers looked up and said, Here comes that dreamer! Let s kill him and throw him into one of these empty pits. We ll tell our father that a wild animal got him and then we ll see what becomes of his dreams. But Reuben, the oldest, said, Let s not kill him. Let s just throw him into one of these pits (thinking that he would come back later and rescue him). 4
So, they did. They grabbed him, stripped him of that beautiful robe, and then threw him into an empty cistern, too deep to climb out of. And then they sat down to eat. I don t know what became of Reuben, but while the rest of them were having lunch they saw a caravan of slave traders coming toward them on their way to Egypt, and Judah said, Instead of killing the Dreamer let s sell him to these slave traders. That way we won t be guilty of shedding his blood, and we can make a little money to boot! His brothers loved that idea and, sure enough, when the slave traders were passing by they pulled Joseph up out of that pit and sold him for twenty pieces of silver. When Reuben got back and found out what had happened he tore his clothes and said, Don t you see? This is going to kill our father! And so they came up with a plan. They slaughtered a goat and dipped Joseph s robe in the blood. It may not have been a coat of many colors originally, but now there was at least one color on it that hadn t been there before: the bright red color of blood. They took it to their father and said, We found this in the field. Do you think it could be Joseph s? And when Jacob saw it he tore his clothes and cried out, It is! It s his robe! He s been eaten by a wild animal! He s been torn to pieces! Jacob wept as he had never wept before, not even when his beloved Rachel died. When his sons tried to comfort him he said, No! There is no comforting me! My grief will take me down to Sheol to be with my son Joseph! It was as if Jacob s life had ended. But in many ways Joseph s life was just beginning. I picture him on his way to Egypt, roped together with all those other slaves, his hands tied behind his back, and stunned absolutely stunned by what has happened to him. He was always the Golden Boy, always his father s favorite, but now he has been 5
sold for 20 pieces of silver. The only thing that kept him going were those dreams. And that s what makes me think they were God-given. I mean, I ve had some dreams before. I ve had some doozies! I wake up shaking my head and wondering, Where did that come from? But these dreams Joseph had of his brothers bowing down to him hadn t God given those dreams to sustain him in a moment like this one, when those same brothers had sold him into slavery? Weren t those dreams in his head to remind him that God wasn t finished yet, that even this story might have a happy ending? Not all dreams are like that: people dream of scoring the winning touchdown, graduating from an ivy-league college, or making a million dollars before they turn forty. Those are human dreams. But some dreams are God-given, and God seems to give them to us to keep us going when things are at their worst. The Bible is full of dreamers like that: Moses, who dreamed of a land flowing with milk and honey, and kept on dreaming even when he and God s people were in the middle of the desert with nothing to eat or drink. Ezekiel, who dreamed of a valley of dry bones, and who saw them come rattling together so that a great multitude stood up even when God s people were languishing in exile. Jesus, who dreamed of God s kingdom come, of that time when God would be with his people, and wipe every tear from their eye, and death, and sorrow, and crying, and pain would be no more. Don t you think those dreams kept them going when times were hard? Don t you think God gave them those dreams for just that reason? It s one thing to believe in your 6
dreams, but it s another thing altogether to believe in God s dreams. We have a name for that: we call it faith. I was having trouble holding on to my faith yesterday. I was watching the news coverage from Charlottesville, where a group of white nationalists were protesting the city s decision to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee. I thought of Martin Luther King and his dream of a nation where black people and white people could live in harmony. I believe that dream was God-given. I believe it because I know God loves this world of many colors; he loves it so much he gave his only son. I know that Jesus loves the little children. Red and yellow black and white, they are precious in his sight. I believe that God-given dream kept Martin Luther King going when times were hard: when the Civil Rights Movement was met with massive resistance; when firehoses were turned on peaceful protestors; when vicious dogs were let off the leash; when billy clubs thudded down on black skulls. I have a dream! King insisted, and he kept on insisting even when times were hard. I was thinking about that dream yesterday when I saw people on television dressed in the garb of the Ku Klux Klan, when I saw others carrying Nazi flags and hatefilled posters, when one person rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing one and injuring many more. I wondered what had become of Martin s dream. I wondered what he would say about all of that. I was still wondering when I went to bed last night but early this morning I got an answer. It may have been a dream, but I thought I heard Martin say, Jim, have a little faith, will you? Put things in historical perspective. When we marched on Selma in 1965 we didn t have the governor on our side, denouncing racism. And the counter-protestors who showed up were people who wanted 7
to crush our skulls. Think about it, Jim: yesterday in Charlottesville the white supremacists found out what it s like to be a minority! We may have been knocked back a step at that rally but the dream is still alive and we shall overcome someday! Now, that s faith! That s the kind of faith that kept Joseph moving toward Egypt with a smile on his face, even when his neck was in an iron collar. That s the kind of faith that kept Moses moving through the wilderness, even when his mouth was dry and his belly empty. That s the kind of faith that kept Ezekiel singing the songs of Zion, even when he was in a foreign land. And that s the kind of faith that allowed Jesus to say, Father, forgive them, even when he was hanging on a cross. What about you? What kind of dreams keep you going? Ask yourself: are they your dreams or God s dreams, because if they are God s dreams they will never die. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Today, on that same site, there is a plaque inscribed with a quote from Genesis 37. It reads: They said, one to another, Behold, here cometh the Dreamer. Let us slay him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams (vss. 19-20). If they had been his dreams, they would have been dead and gone a long time ago. But not God s dreams. No, not God s dreams. God s dreams never die. Jim Somerville 2017 8