Genesis 37:3, 12-28
In 2002, the air was leaking out of the DotCom bubble, and we were embarking on two disastrous wars of misdirected vengeance that would destroy countless lives and further fan the flames of terrorism around the globe. In the anxiety of our post-9/11 culture, many searched for meaning, and Rick Warren, pastor of a conservative megachurch in California was willing to offer it. His book, “The Purpose Driven Life,” would sit on the New York Times bestseller list for 90 weeks, and sell 32 million copies over the next ten years.
The premise of the book is simple. In fact, the book opens with the words “It’s not about you…” Warren’s theology is that God put you, as in you individually, on earth with a purpose. Your job, according to Warren, is to figure out what that purpose is, then to live it, to have a purpose-driven life.
This is the ultimate micro-managing god, not content to give life at large a purpose or to give a species a purpose or even to give a specially-chosen people a purpose, but to have a purpose for each individual human life. There is no mention of the purpose of the woodchuck that breaks into my yard like a stunt double from Mission Impossible, though I am convinced his, or maybe her, purpose is to destroy my cucumbers. This is anthro-centric theology, with no real attention to the rest of the interdependent web of creation.
You will not be surprised to know that I find this claim of individual divine purpose for humans theologically untenable.
This is the sort of god who heals Sally because enough people prayed for her, who let’s a gunman slaughter children in a school because he wants new angels, which is crazy even in that crazy system since angels are not dead children. This god, if such a god existed, would bear responsibility for horrors, global and personal, would be arbitrary and capricious, and not worthy of our worship.
And even if we were to concede all of these points and worship this malignant and omnipotent being, we’d still face the reality that divine purpose erases individual freedom, falling into a trap much like predestination. No wonder adherents of this form of the Fundamentalist heresy align so easily with fascist politicians. Their god is a Fascist.
This morning, we continue in reading the stories of the Biblical Patriarchs, though there are no patriarchs without matriarchs, so they are there too, if de-emphasized by the ancient authors.
We heard the story of Abraham and Sarah, her infertility and longing for a son, the birth of Ishmael to an enslaved woman, the miraculous birth of Isaac to Sarah, and the abandonment of Ishmael and his mother.
We heard of the cruel testing, when myth tells us that God demanded the murder of that beloved son, Isaac, as a test of faith, only to substitute a ram when it was clear Abraham would comply, was willing to engage in child sacrifice.
We heard in turn about Isaac’s son, Jacob, Mommy’s little favorite, who steals his twin brother’s birthright, wrestles with God, and eventually finds reconciliation with his brother and prosperity in Canaan.
Today, we come to Jacob’s sons. Joseph is a dreamer of dreams and an interpreter of dreams. He tells his older brothers of two dreams he interprets as signs of his superiority over the others. If his arrogance were not enough, parental favoritism is again in play, Jacob giving Joseph an expensive coat, a Tommy Hilfiger-exclusive for ancient times. The brothers plot, consider killing the little brat, then settle on selling him off into slavery.
But myths exist to explain, so there is a lot more to the story. Joseph continues to dream and to interpret dreams, is in the right household at the right moment, and rises to one of the highest offices in the land, as chamberlain to the Pharaoh managing the day-to-day business of the Egyptian kingdom. Famine will drive the brothers to Egypt in search of aid, where they encounter a Joseph who they no longer recognize. How could they? They sold the boy as a slave, encountered him as a man of immense power.
The good news is that we are once again given a model of reconciliation, and that the Abrahamic people are now in place for the cruelty of a later pharaoh, for Moses and for the Exodus, the story at the heart of Jewish identity, a story of God being on the side of the powerless.
I am not interested in whether or not Joseph had prophetic dreams, whether or not he was living a life with divine purpose, whether or not he even existed. All of that is unknowable, and honestly, everything before Moses is best treated as legend. Only with the Exodus do we start to get the first glimmers of historicity.
What I am interested in is what the Joseph story can teach us today. For make no mistake, the fundamental problems that faced the figures of biblical myth are the same problems we face today wearing a different face. We have seen the enemy, and it is us.
Creation is tenacious, resilient, and a reflection of the Divine Mystery that is source, a mystery to which we attach the placeholder “God.” Don’t believe me? Come try to kill the bindweed in my yard. No, seriously, ya’ll are welcome to get your garden gloves and knee pads and come on over, though you have to deal with the abandoned property next door as well.
That bindweed is hard-wired and wiry and you can pull and dig, but you aren’t going to get it all.
We are the far tip of one branch of an evolutionary tree and we are only here because of luck and grit, because of the will to survive, which means to adapt, to innovate, and because of a bunch of things we cannot control.
You are here, as in this morning in this place, because of things you did not control.
You are here, as in this morning in this place, because of things you did control. Because, nevertheless, you persisted. And there is some holiness right there.
God’s purpose for you? I suppose the system is a plan of sorts, the bodies that grow then fade, the random rolls of genetics, the way star stuff is recycled. And there is something to be said for a graceful exit, when a graceful exit is possible. But right now, your purpose is to live, to create, to love.
In his poem “Oh me! Oh life!,” Walt Whitman makes a short list of life’s challenges, not his usual exhaustive catalog, then poses the question “What good amid these, O me, O life?”
Then he does a remarkable thing, as poetry approaches new forms. The next stanza is nothing more than “Answer.” Then he provides that answer:
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
You may contribute a verse. Though I tend to think of it more as a song than a play, as jazz improvisation rather than a rehearsed symphony, for God is just about as funky as she can be.
We dance because these bodies are amazing and using them releases chemical that give us pleasure, but we watch others dance, on a stage or in the kitchen, because we are connected with life, entangled. We tell stories because they teach us, but also because we imagine “What if that was me?” And that imagining is holy and weird and that is our purpose, not seeking to placate a domestic abuser in the sky, but living, creating, and sometimes fighting.
Maybe Joseph was a dreamer. Maybe he was in touch with some mysterious force. Maybe he was just a great con artist. But in the story, he survived, and that is what matters. In the story which is part of our deep story, he saved his family. No Joseph, no Moses, no Jesus, no radical abolitionists in Elmira, no Independent Congregational Church, no beautiful and sacred place next to the park, where we challenge each other to an impossible purpose, to survive and thrive into this amazing story as agents of God’s liberating justice and serendipitous creativity. It is all connected and all amazing.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Most Amazing God,
Creator of Life and of Death,
we lose ourselves
for a moment
in prayer,
remembering our finitude
our fragility.
We pray for those barely surviving,
those who are exhausted,
wells of imagination run dry,
hope flickering in the high winds
of human cruelty
human greed.
Hope was hard to find
in Galilee
as empire conquered and exploited
to fund more conquest
and exploitation,
a predatory cycle.
Jesus dared to suggest a better way,
a kingdom reversal
a kingdom of justice and love.
We pray as he taught us saying:
Our Father