Speaking Out

 Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28:

In the book of Numbers and in Exodus, we are told that God will punish the sins of parents to the third and fourth generation (Num 14:18; Exod. 34:7), and while there are other passages that counteract that, in particular Deuteronomy, and then Jesus saying that the blind man was not born blind because of the sins of his parents, we can still see if maybe not punishing to future generations, that the sins the parents committed keep happening generation after generation. That is even true today. There have been some very interesting sociological studies of crime extending through multiple generations. In one study in England it found that 2/3 of all male youths convicted of crimes came from just 10% of families. And while there were many reasons, much of it was about expectations and also about learned behaviors. The same way that families will have multiple generations of doctors or lawyers or even preachers. We imitate what we see our parents do. There are learned behaviors that we follow. The same is also true in churches.

Every church has a unique DNA that is learned about how things happen and how we do things. One church I served had a particular way that they handled conflict, and so you could read back through the history of the church, which was over 100 years old, and keep seeing the same things happening over and over again, especially when it came to conflict. People learned the behavior of how that church operated. But, what I can also say about that church is that in knowing that history, they were making a concerted effort to stop it. To break the pattern, and learning and teaching healthy and appropriate ways to deal with conflict. And so sometimes the sins continue, and sometimes they can be stopped. We see this in families as well. Linda’s father was physically abused when he was a child by his father, as, more than likely, his father had been abused, and his father had been abused, for who knows how long. But you know what he didn’t do to Linda or her sisters? Abuse them. He stopped the pattern of behavior and hopefully that behavior has now been wiped out of the family line. It is no longer being perpetuated and carried on generation after generation.

Now I say all that because in our look at the origin stories of the people who will be called Israelites, we have been seeing dysfunction carried out through two generations, and now we are moving into the third generation. And in some cases calling this family dysfunctional might be an understatement, because we might argue about the function part at all. And now that we are in the third generation we’re wondering what is going to continue and when someone might decide to stop the same patterns from continuing to pass on from generation to generation. I mean Sarah clearly preferred her own son Isaac over the half-brother Ishmael so much that she has Abraham cast them from the household and she is not even concerned whether they live or die in the wilderness. Then Abraham attempts to kill Isaac, and Isaac seems so damaged by the event that we actually know little about his life. But, we are told that Isaac loves Esau more than Jacob, while Rebekah wife loves Jacob more. And so Rebekah plots to have the blessing go to Jacob, which leads Esau to plot to kill his brother, harkening much farther back into the family line to Cain and Abel. I’m sure that family reunions are fun events, with people having 911 on speed dial.

So now we come to the family of Jacob to see if anyone has learned anything, and right at the start we are told that it appears not because we are told that Jacob, who of anyone should know better, loves Joseph more than any of the 11 other brothers.  Joseph is the 11th son born, but he is the first child born to Rachel, the wife Jacob loves the most of his four wives, or at least two wives and two concubines. And when people talk about Biblical marriage, they are overlooking this example. We are told that because Leah isn’t preferred that God makes her very fertile in bearing sons, but it doesn’t help, Rachel is still the beloved, but she remains without children until she says to Isaac “give me a child or I shall die,” which harkens back to the punishment given to Eve, as first she gives birth to Joseph and then she dies while giving birth to Benjamin, the 12th son, from which we get the 12 tribes of Israel. Now it’s not really the fact that Jacob loves Joseph more than the other sons, it’s the fact that he acts on this and he gives Joseph an amazing technicolor dreamcoat which allows Joseph to rub the fact that he is preference into everyone else’s face. And to tell you how strange and convoluted this becomes, Joseph ends up being portrayed by a Mormon pretending to be a Jew. Only in America!

Now the truth is the Hebrew used here doesn’t say that this coat is in Technicolor, nor even that it is many colors, but it is special, although we’re not clear how, because the Hebrew is unclear, and it’s the much later Greek translation that gives us the colors. But regardless it’s because of this coat that we are told that Joseph’s brother’s hate him. But, it’s not just the coat. It’s also that Joseph not only rats out his brother for bad behavior, and then in the section that was dropped out of the passage we heard this morning in order to be a little more concise, Joseph has two dreams which his family interpret as him saying that he will rule over them and they will bow down to him. In some ways it sounds sort of like typical behavior for a 17-year-old boy who thinks that he is smarter and better than everyone in his family, and in return they can’t stand it from him, and honestly I think we can have some sympathy with his brothers because Joseph is acting like a jerk. But, they go off to tend the family sheep while Joseph stays back at the tents, just like Jacob did in comparison to Esau, and Jacob calls out to Joseph to go see what they are doing, and Joseph’s answer is “Here I am” which echoes back to many prior stories, both good and bad. And so Joseph sets off to find his brothers. Now we might ask why Jacob is sending Joseph and whether he is asking Joseph to spy on them again, as he had apparently done the first time, as well as whether Jacob really doesn’t see what’s going on between joseph and the other 10, as Benjamin is not involved in the stories yet.  And when the brothers see Joseph coming, wearing his o-so-special coat, their anger and resentment rise and they plot to kill him. Ringing lots of familiar bells yet? And we might begin to ask, how long is this going to go on? Is anyone even going to try and stop this craziness from continuing from generation to generation?

And here Joseph gets an unlikely savior in his oldest brother Reuben. Now as we talk about names from last week, there is speculation about his name with some arguing that Leah named him this because it means “he has seen my misery”, meaning that God has given Leah a son knowing that Jacob favors her sister Rachel. While another interpretation says that it means “he will love me” meaning that in delivering a boy for Jacob will bring Leah into favor with Jacob, all depending on how we might see the Hebrew that’s being used. But either way, it’s a powerful reminder of what favoritism is doing to this family. And Reuben definitely falls on his father’s bad side when he has an affair with Bilhah, his father’s concubine and Rachel’s maid, and eventually Jacob will give Reuben’s birthright at the first born to Joseph. Will we never learn? But it doesn’t appear that Reuben is with his brothers when they plot to kill Joseph as we are told that when he hears of it, he stops it from happening, and instead tells his brother to throw Joseph into a pit with the intention of coming back and rescuing Joseph from the pit later. But, Reuben stands up to his brothers and stopping their plan to kill Joseph.

Researchers have done a lot of study into group think and how it works and how to break it.  One of the studies done, put a volunteer into a room with a group of other people and their goal was to solve math problems.  They would be shown a math problem, along with 4 possible answers, and these weren’t hard problems, and then as a group they had to decide on an answer.  What the volunteer didn’t know was that everyone else in the group was part of the research team, and they had plotted to give the wrong answer to see what would happen.  In the vast majority of the cases the volunteer went along with the group even though they knew the answer was wrong.  Why?  Because they didn’t want to go against what the group was saying.  That is that group think caused most volunteers to give the wrong answer because they didn’t want to be the one to speak up and say something was wrong. 

But, in a follow-up experiment, they found that if just one of the other people in the room, who were also part of the research team, were to speak up first and give a different answer from the group that it gave permission to the volunteer to also speak up.  This was true even if the second answer given was also wrong.  Once the group think had been broken by one other person giving a difference answer, then the volunteers did not go along with the group, instead they gave their own answers which differed from the group.  All it took to stop for the wrong answer being given, all it took for something different to be done, was one person standing up to say stop.  And we know this is true because we see it all the time.  We’ve all been in groups where a question is asked, or people are asked to speak, and getting that first person to speak is always the hardest part.  There’s always that long akward silence, until finally someone breaks the ice, and then once that happens other people speak up willingly.  That first person who is willing to speak up is the one who makes all the difference. And that’s where we can see the stopping of sins continuing on for generation after generation. Reuben stands up and speaks out.

Now of course speaking out is not easy to do. We want to be liked, we don’t want to rock the boat, we want to go along with others, and all of the things that play a roll in not speaking out have to be overcome. And that’s not easy to do, and most of the time that group think reigns it's not a matter of life and death, but if we don't speak up in easy situations, we won't speak up in difficult ones. The other thing that affects what Reuben did is that he probably has every reason not to speak up as Jacob’s preference for Joseph, as I’ve said, has an even bigger impact on him then it does for the other brothers as the first bon son, and yet he is the one who does it. Are we ready to speak up even for people we might not like?             

Now Reuben doesn’t fully save Joseph, as he goes away and in the interim Joseph is sold off into slavery in Egypt. It’s not quite clear what happens here if it is the brothers who sell him or if it’s the Midianite traders who sell him, but the story helps explain how it is that everyone ends up in Egypt, which we’ll complete next week, and also gives us this witness of the call to make a difference. We don’t know what would have happened had Reuben not stepped up and said no to his brothers and stopped the plan to kill him, but Reuben did step up and the plans were changed.  Sometimes we are afraid to say anything, we want to go along with crowd, we don’t want to be the one to speak up, we are afraid, and sometimes that fear is justified. 

At the memorial service for Martin Luther King, Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the opening sentences were from today’s passage.  “Here comes this dreamer.  Come now, let us kill him… and we shall see what shall become of his dreams.”  Sometimes, often times, speaking up comes with a cost, but we also have to ask ourselves what will happen if we don’t speak up?  How would we answer that question of what role we played in those events?  The simple fact is Reuben changed the story because he was willing to say no, to say stop, even though he was a victim of Joseph’s arrogance and immaturity just as much as his brothers, but he spoke up and he changed things. And as we will see, in doing that he stops the multi-generational dysfunction that has affected this family.  As we hear stories in the news of the atrocities that are going, of violence and racial hatred, or we simply see one person being treated cruelly and unkindly, the answer to solving that problem, of stopping things from continuing, of ending the cycle, might be as simple as us stepping up and saying, “stop.”  I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.