There is only us.

Genesis 45

Let’s catch up.

We’re here at the end of the Joseph story. Joseph, the beloved, chosen son of Rachel and Jacob, is sold to Midianites as a slave by his seething, jealous brothers. The brothers report to their devastated father that Jacob has been killed by a wild animal. They show him a multi-colored coat dipped in blood.

Time rolls on. Paths diverge. The story follows on parallel tracks. Last week we followed the track of Judah. Today we see what became of Joseph.

He does well for himself. He ends up in the service of the Pharaoh of Egypt. Through skilled dream interpretation, a divine plan, and impressive self-control Joseph climbs the ranks. He becomes the overseer of all of Egypt’s affairs, Pharaoh’s right hand man.

Below the surface of today’s story is a lesson about the dangers of assimilation. Egypt and the fledgling people of Israel were vastly different cultures. We remember that the people following Jacob are a nomadic people, wandering from place to place. They have no land and no temple. They are in midst of a life where trust in God’s provision is required. God must make a way.

Egypt was a culture of control. Masters of nature, the Egyptians learned to predict floods and to recognize the signs of coming drought. Pharaoh himself was the center of this order – a god who controlled the rising and setting of the sun and the patterns of harvest. The Egyptians produced the most sophisticated architecture, administration, and technology in the ancient world.

Joseph fits right in. As we see Joseph moving further in time from his Hebrew family, his appearance changes. He sheds his clothing and adopts Egyptian dress. And he shaves his face and head.

We might pass by this detail, but it’s of significance for the transformation of Joseph. In Egyptian culture, shaving was another form of control over the natural world. Without access to hair dye, the Egyptians realized that their graying hair was a sign of age and decay. Shaving was a way to deny time, to delay the effects of time. Shaving one’s head became an emblem of Egypt – the ability of humans to control death.

Here the parallel stories of Jacob’s sons collide. They are brought together by famine. This famine was foreseen by Joseph in a dream. A good Egyptian, he puts his skills in management to use organizing and storing for the lean years ahead. They are ready.

But famine hits Israel’s people hard. The subjects of God’s mercy and miraculous intervention, without assistance they will die. They hear a rumor that there is grain in Egypt. Outside the text, we watch wide-eyed as the fratricidal brothers near the throne of Joseph.

They don’t recognize him. He’s done it. He’s fully assimilated into the world of Egypt, a true Egyptian through and through. He disguises his language, pretending that he cannot understand the desperate men before him. And then, for reasons not clear to us, but certainly within his character, Joseph devises a series of schemes. There’s trickery, framing the brothers for a robbery. He devises a plan to test them, to see if they’ve changed their ways. Will they sacrifice another brother, Benjamin, the only remaining son of Rachel?

The chaos and emotion culminate in the scene we read today. Judah makes an impassioned speech to the disguised brother whom he allowed to be sold into slavery. When Joseph demands the life of Benjamin as payment for the set-up of stolen silver, Judah steps in. He pleads. “We have a father, an old man,” Judah says, “and we have a young brother, the child of his old age.”

“The boy cannot leave his father, for if he should leave his father, his father would die.” Judah asks if he can take Benjamin’s place, a life for a life, to spare their father more pain, more heartache.

And Joseph weeps. His cries fill the air, echoing through the palace. He sends away the Egyptian servants, a last attempt at concealment, a last-ditch effort at self-control. But it’s too late – “he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it.” Time catches up with Joseph, a past that is never past.

This is an undoing, an unraveling. Joseph, master of control, able to head off the sexual advances of Potiphar’s wife, to withstand false imprisonment, to twice suppress his welling emotions as he encounters his brothers – he loses it. He finally loses control.

Bodies matter in Genesis. The controlled body, assimilated fully into Egypt, breaks and is freed into the chaotic human emotions of return and reunification.

Joseph returns to his people. He returns home to be his father’s son, to continue the line of Israel in the promised land. The brothers return, all of them, with grain, what they can carry. They submit themselves to the God of provision, expecting that God will continue to be present to them and ensure their survival without the meticulous grain stores of Egypt.

 

 

That’s not how the story goes. Joseph does not return to his people. He and his brothers don’t live happily ever after in the promised land, with their own people, among their kin. Instead, for the first and only time in the Hebrew Bible a father follows his son into a new land. Jacob gets up and goes to Egypt with all that he has. We get an exhaustive list of every person who goes. To remind us the finality of this move Genesis tells us “all the persons of the house of Jacob came into Egypt.” All of them.

Joseph remains in Pharaoh’s court. He provides for his family, settling them in the best part of the land, offering up the surety and prosperity that he’s provided for the Egyptian. But we can feel the tension in the narrative. Jacob’s last words to his son are the request for a sworn oath. Joseph vows to take his father’s body and to bury it in Canaan, the land of the ancestors, to get him out of Egypt and back to where he belongs. The years pass but the foreboding lingers. On his death bed, Joseph’s final words to his brothers are cryptic: “When God come to you, you shall carry my bones from here.” Why would God need to come to them? What is going to happen?

What happens next is that a new Pharaoh who “did not know Joseph” comes to power and he brutally enslaves the people of Israel. God will be silent for the next four hundred years. The bodies protected by Egypt will become their slaves. We read that “they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built the supply cities, Pithom and Ramses, for Pharaoh.” How ironic that the decedents of Joseph who were saved by well-managed food become the forced labor to build cities of grain.

Genesis waves a flag of warning. Attempts to integrate into an imperial society, a colonial power – this is the way of enslavement and death.

 

 

As I read this story this week I wanted to weep with Joseph at seeing his brother. I wanted to hear the warnings of being a people set apart, by faith and by non-violence. But this week I read this Scripture, and it was impossible to look past the warning against assimilation.

Last Saturday I checked in on social media to find out if my friends were all right. They were in Charlottesville, counter-protesting a white supremacy rally called Unite the Right. There was violence. A woman named Heather Heyer was killed when a car mowed through a crowd of protestors. Many were injured.

In the aftermath one interview caught my eye. A young man from Nevada named Peter became the face of the white supremacist rally. In an interview, he was unnerved by the publicity of the picture. The rally, he explained, wasn’t only the KKK or white nationalist. It was about preserving identity, about refusing assimilation. He told a journalist, “As a white nationalist, I care for all people. We all deserve a future for our children and for our culture. White nationalists aren’t all hateful; we just want to preserve what we have.”

We just want to preserve what we have. I heard lines like this over and over again in defense of Unite the Right. We need to let white culture thrive alongside other cultures. We can’t fuse into the mixing pot of America. We’re afraid of losing our heritage.

The story of Joseph is about a call to trust in God’s provision. It’s a call to be set apart. It’s also a story about the desire to control destinies, of the anxiety to preserve ethnic identity. We sense this tension throughout Scripture. Israel is always negotiating what it means to be a chosen people, set apart, yet living in the land.

Chosen-ness is complicated in the Old Testament, stories that uproot the fear of controlling an ethnicity. Stories about the fear of ethnic mixing exist alongside stories about the porousness of boundaries. There are stories of foreigners who become vehicles of conversion for the people of God. There are stories of outsiders who are more righteous, more faithful than the people God has called. There are stories of those outside the covenant who make a way for God’s people. We hear their names, mostly women, lifted up in the New and Old Testament – Tamar, Hagar, Ruth, Rahab.

The complexity of Scripture, the complexity of human life is our inability to be surprised by God’s work through those we would not expect. Fear clouds our willingness to see the blessedness of others. Fears turns us from God’s surprising work of ingathering into a white knuckled hold onto what we can control.

Jesus reminds us that our need to control the outcome of God’s blessedness in incredibly human. That need is lurking in the Gospel story we heard today. Jesus must unlearn his own desire for ethnic separation.

In Matthew, we find Jesus preaching against purity laws. His defiance of the laws that separate Jews from non-Jews have rankled the religious leaders. Food laws, what to eat and what not to eat, how to wash, with whom to eat – this is how Israel embodied the lesson of their forefather Jacob.

Jesus doesn’t live by these rules. He touches the dead and bleeding. He eats with those who have been declared ritually unclean because of their bodies and professions. He reworks Sabbath laws.

But then something happens. Jesus takes off with his disciples into Gentile land, physically crossing the boundary from Tyre into Sidon. Here, among foreigners, she comes to him – a woman and Gentile. The Canaanite woman screams to him – “Son of David, my daughter is tormented by a demon.”

And Jesus ignores her. He hears her crying for help and he ignores her. When she persists, the disciples try to send her away. Jesus stops. He says to her, “it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to dogs.”

It’s an insult. “Dogs” has a similar connotation to its use today. It was frequently used by Jews to defame their opponents. A woman, begging for the life of her daughter, is insulted by Jesus on the basis of her ethnicity.

She pushes back. She doesn’t let the matter rest. She tells him there is enough. There is enough healing, enough for everyone. There is enough blessedness for all. She puts to action what Jesus cannot. She lives out the word he has preached. God is also crossing over, grafting the Gentiles into God’s life, into God’s people.

The fear passed down to Jesus is the story we hear in the life of Joseph. The fear is forgetting, of an eradication of a vulnerable people, a people who will forget God. In Jesus, we discover that all along God was imagining something else, something that neither Joseph nor Jacob could imagine. God is not concerned with survival or cultural markers of faithfulness. God is going about blessing the world, blessing the world through a people who discover over and over again that God is full of surprises.

We learn from Jesus that believing this and the courage to act on this belief takes faith. “‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly,” we read in Matthew.

 

I spent a lot of time this week thinking about the people, mostly young men my age and younger, who went to the Unite the Right rally. They went without hoods. What’s the significance of this, of boldly coming out as a white supremacist in public?

I couldn’t stop looking at the pictures on the screen. Without hoods, I couldn’t escape that those faces are my face. Because these are men trying to hold onto a vision of the world that benefits me, people with my skin —a society that privileges white people. They want to control the world, to maintain a world, a culture, a society that is for me, for people with my skin, for people with my heritage.

And they wanted me to see them, to see that they’re just like me, to convince me that their way of the world is winning, because it’s won the White House, because it’s in the justice department, because it’s carving up our district voting maps. They want me to believe that this is better for me, that good, clean-cut young men are standing up for me.

But then I hear the Canaanite woman calling to Jesus. “Son of David” she calls him. She reminds him that God is already at work in Jesus body, already the blood of the Gentiles Rahab and Ruth runs in his veins. There is no “them” in God’s life, there is only “us.”

This week we’re offered the chance to look at our own lives, to ask how we’re complicit in controlling a future we have built on fear, whether we do so with our silence or with our participation. We’re welcomed to discover that the white supremacists who gather in Atlanta and Charlottesville and Boston are wrong. Jesus learned it, and so must we. God has always been at work in ways we could never expect.