Creatio Ex Nihilo

A Messy Life: God the Absentee Father?

It was shortly after his father died that my friend Scott and I met at a pub to talk.  Even though he was grieving the loss of his father, Scott felt a lot of anger toward him.  He harbored many resentments toward him and was haunted by unresolved arguments with him.  I asked Scott what sorts of things he was angry about and he was able to recount incidents from thirty years ago with stunning clarity.

Scott was a pretty good baseball player.  It had been his passion his whole life.  Yet it was also a source of pain for him, especially in regard to his father.  He remembered Little League games that his father had promised to attend. As a young boy, he would look into the bleachers, hoping to see him, but his father was seldom around.  As he moved up to high school, Scott became quite a good pitcher.  What hurt him most was the fact that, as he became a local baseball hero,  his father never came to see him pitch a single game.  It wasn’t just during the good games that he missed his father.  It was during the bad games as well, during the hard losses and disappointments.

“I feel like I’ll be carrying around this resentment the rest of my life,” Scott said depressingly.  “My father was never there when I needed him.”

Many of you may have had fathers who, due to a heavy workload or just plain indifference, never seemed to be there for you when we needed them.  Many of you in this room, who are fathers now, struggle to be a different kind of father.  You make the effort to attend every one of your child’s games or concerts.  You work hard to be involved in all the aspect of your kid’s lives.  The last thing you ever want to be called is an absentee father.

When we read the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis, it can seem like the tale of an absentee father - or two.  Joseph’s father, Jacob, sometimes referred to as Israel, does not play a large role in moving any of the plot forward.  He favors Joseph more than his other sons, even going so far as to give him a special ornamental coat.  But when the brothers become jealous, even going so far as to plot his murder, Jacob doesn’t bother to correct them, or stop their schemes against Joseph.  Instead Jacob seems to passively sit back and allow this evil to happen.  Surely, we wonder to ourselves, Jacob could have made the effort to get a little more involved in Joseph’s life.

A Messy Life: Getting Uneven

When I was growing up in the seventies, movie heroes were a complex lot.  Actually, they were more anti-heroes than they were heroes.  The kind of people you weren’t sure whether you should root for or not.  When you did, you felt slightly guilty.  Dirty Harry was a great example.  He perfectly encapsulated our frustration at the time with America’s legal system and guilty criminals perceived as getting off easy.  He did all the things we secretly wanted done to those degenrates.  With our ambivalence awakened, we simultaneously cheered him on and felt revulsion toward him as he doled out revenge.

Joseph would have made a perfect seventies anti-hero.  When we first meet him he is thoroughly unlikable and a behaves like a spoiled brat.  His jealous brothers throw him down a well and sell him into slavery in Egypt.  While there, he works his way up to being the number two man in the country.  He rebounds from all his bad fortune and overcomes the horrible things his family did to him.  So years later, when his brothers come groveling before him and don’t even recognize him, we imagine it’s the perfect time for Joseph to get his revenge.  With his brothers, bowed before him just as his dream predicted, we want Joseph to look down at them and with a Clint Eastwood squint say, “Go ahead.  Make my day!”

Like any good (or is it bad?) anti-hero, Joseph has a complex mixture of qualities that appeal to the best and worst in ourselves.  Last week, we explored his admirable traits - the way his avoidance of self-pity, adherence to his values and willingness to engage his new culture enabled him to thrive there.  He was able to fit in without selling out.   

But like us, Joseph’s life is messy.  Today we see his petty side.  Although in the past, he seemed to be able to keep his resentments and past hurts in check, having his brothers bowed down in front of him is too tempting to resist.

A Messy Life: Fitting In Without Selling Out

We’ve all had times in life when  everything changes suddenly.  Sometimes, it’s due to a bad turn of events.  Sometimes, it’s just the natural course of life.  For instance, you my have gone away to college and found yourself in an entirely new world. Or you may have changed jobs at one point in your career and discovered that your new company does business in a way very different from your old one.  When confronted with these changes, you have to decide how you were going to live your life in this new environment.   In both cases, you may find yourself facing moral or ethical challenges in which you have to choose how you will act.  You may find yourself in situations where your old sense of values is challenged.

When his brothers sold him into slavery in Egypt, Joseph faced the same situation.  He found himself working in the household of a powerful Egyptian named Potipher.  Yet Joseph is able to not only survive I his new surroundings, he thrives in them.   How is he able to do that?  At the risk of sounding like a cotemporary mega-church preacher, I think the story teaches us three things.

First, when his life falls apart, Joseph doesn’t sulk about it.  After a Mrs. Robinson encounter with Potipher’s wife, Joseph is falsely accused of hitting on her.  He finds himself imprisoned.  He could have just felt sorry for himself, but instead he looks for the opportunity in this new situation.  He meets two Egyptian officials who have also been incarcerated and correctly interprets their dreams for them.  Down the road, this leads to him being released from prison and being elevated to the number two position in Egypt.

A Messy Life: Dreaming Amidst Dysfunction

Remember how, when you were a kid, you were so willing to answer the question, “So what do you want to be when you grow up?”  No matter how challenging or unlikely your dream occupation may have been, you didn’t hesitate to say it.  Astronaut.  Olympic athlete.  Spy. Ballerina. Movie star.  All of them seemed to be within the reach of our young imaginations.  Although they seemed innocent enough, these dreams of fame and fortune were often fueled by childish needs for attention or approval.  As children, let’s face it, our dreams were often rooted in less than magnanimous motivations.  But even though those dreams of the future were unlikely and even sometimes egotistical, for many of us, they sustained us through childhood and beyond.

The character of Joseph shares that trait with us.  He is described as a dreamer.  He is mocked and hated for it.  His dreams are audacious, unlikely and a tad conceited.  This is exactly what we would expect because, surprisingly, Joseph’s background was a lot like some of ours.

Joseph was the great grandson of the Hebrew patriarch Abraham and the son of Jacob, sometimes referred to as Israel. Coming from a family of famous Bible characters, we might expect Joseph to have grown up in the perfect idyllic setting.  After all, these are all the spotless heroes of faith we learned of in Sunday School.  Leave your delusions of patriarchal perfection behind.  Joseph’s family had some serious issues.

Let’s look at some of their family history.  Great-granddad Abraham once tried to sell his wife off to gain safe passage to Egypt.  He also took his son Isaac to the top of a mountain, tied him to a rock and attempted to kill him because he believed God was telling him to do so as a test of faith.  That must have made for some awkward holiday dinner conversation.  After surviving that episode and growing blind in his old age, Isaac was conned by his son Jacob (Joseph’s dad) into giving him the inheritance that rightfully belonged to Jacob’s brother.  Jacob went on to become a trixter who tricked a man into giving him his daughter in marriage. In other words, Joseph’s family makes Jon and Kate’s look positively functional.