I wonder, do you have any family drama?
Being a pastor, I get to know families, and so I get to learn about family
drama. Most often it comes up when I am meeting with a family to plan a wedding
or a funeral. Interesting isn’t it? That a happy event brings out the worst in
people? Lots of drama happens out of a wonderful event. And when a loved one dies, and our emotions
are raw, well, I guess it’s no surprise that the family drama is in full force
at the funeral home.
People start fighting over who is going
to get what stuff. Or they start telling stories about old family hurts and
stuff that we thought was well behind us is still right there with us. It was
right under the surface waiting to cause trouble. Let’s face it, when you
gather all the family together, folks that don’t get together that often, all
the years and generations of trouble, and you pack them into one room, well, something
is bound to erupt.
One of the reasons I love to preach on
the Old Testament is because it is filled with raw family drama: lying,
cheating, sibling rivalry, and today we get brothers who hate each other they
almost kill one and then they just settle for selling him into slavery to a far
away land and letting their father think that his beloved son is dead. Nice
family!
In worship, we watched a video made
recently asking people today how they get along in their families. We’ll post a link to it on the Village web
page and Facebook page, but the short summary is:
·
Many admitted that there are MANY
problems in their family
·
Everyone seemed to think their parents
had a favorite
I am the youngest and I can attest to
the fact that the older siblings often feel that the younger gets off easier. I
think parents just get more relaxed in their parenting the longer they do it
and so the older ones just think the younger ones have it easier.
We know here at The Village that there
are no perfect people. It follows that there are no perfect families. Each
family is dysfunctional in its own way. Now, my husband Kurt’s family is like
the Waltons, or the Huckstables. I could not think of any more current shows
because these days we just get things like Modern Family and the Simpsons on TV
– you know, real, crazy families. We are more realistic now. Not like the
Waltons and Huckstables where everything was sweetness and light.
In
Kurt’s family there are no divorces, in 2014. We have a family Christmas
gathering every year (Christmas on Walton Mountain Kurt calls it) with no
fights and no drama. Seriously. But even his family has some challenges (Kurt
who is blogging today won’t be dishing on any Grandparents, Aunts, Uncle or
Cousins on line. But No Perfect People
is true about all of us). I’ll let him tell you about that after the service.
No family is without problems. From the
beginning of time, it is the nature of human beings to have conflict. The story
of Joseph and his brothers is a great example. It is such a great story that
Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice wrote a Broadway Show about it: “Joseph the
Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.” Jacob, now called Israel in this story, because
he is the father of Israel, (remember all those descendants as many as the
stars in the sky), does appear to be a father who plays favorites. He loves
Joseph. He gives him this coat. The translations describing the coat seem to
vary: maybe it was really colorful. It definitely had long sleeves. Long
sleeves represent royalty and someone who does not need to work in the fields,
contrasted with a sleeveless tunic worn by a working man.
We
skipped one part of this story in our reading for today. Joseph had some dreams
and told them to his brothers. He tells one of the dreams to his brothers the
next day: “We were all out in the field gathering bundles of wheat. All of a
sudden my bundle stood straight up and your bundles circled around it and bowed
down to mine.” His brothers, really liked that and said, “So!
You’re going to rule us? You’re going to boss us around?” He was also a bit of
a tattletale.
As
you can imagine, this did not score him any points with his older brothers. He
was also a tattle tale. He would report back to dad on how his brothers were
doing tending the sheep (Genesis 37 from The Message paraphrase for those
following along on the internet):
18-20 They spotted him off
in the distance. By the time he got to them they had cooked up a plot to kill
him. The brothers were saying, “Here comes that dreamer. Let’s
kill him and throw him into one of these old cisterns; we can say that a
vicious animal ate him up. We’ll see what his dreams amount to.”
21-22 Reuben heard the brothers talking and intervened to save him,
“We’re not going to kill him. No murder. Go ahead and throw him in this cistern out here in
the wild, but don’t hurt him.” Reuben planned to go back later and get him out and take him
back to his father.
23-24 When Joseph reached
his brothers, they ripped off the fancy coat he was wearing, grabbed him, and
threw him into a cistern. The cistern was dry; there wasn’t
any water in it.
25-27 Then they sat down to
eat their supper. Looking up, they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites on their way from Gilead, their camels loaded with spices,
ointments, and perfumes to sell in Egypt. Judah said, “Brothers, what are we going to get
out of killing our brother and concealing the evidence? Let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites, but let’s not
kill him—he is, after all, our brother, our own flesh and blood.” His
brothers agreed.
28 By that time the Midianite traders were passing by. His brothers pulled Joseph out
of the cistern and sold him for twenty pieces of silver to the Ishmaelites who
took Joseph with them down to Egypt.
29-30 Later Reuben
came back and went to the cistern—no Joseph! He ripped his clothes in despair.
Beside himself, he went to his brothers. “The boy’s gone! What am I going to
do!”
31-32 They took Joseph’s
coat, butchered a goat, and dipped the coat in the blood. They took the fancy
coat back to their father and said, “We found this. Look it over—do you think this is your son’s coat?”
33 He recognized it at once. “My son’s coat—a wild animal has eaten him. Joseph torn
limb from limb!”
34-35 Jacob tore his
clothes in grief, dressed in rough burlap, and
mourned his son a long, long time. His sons and daughters tried to comfort him
but he refused their comfort. “I’ll go to the grave mourning my son.” Oh, how
his father wept for him.
36 In Egypt the Midianites
sold Joseph to Potiphar, one of Pharaoh’s officials, manager of his household
affairs.
Next week we will learn that it was important for Joseph to
be in Egypt. God used the brothers’ horrible actions for good. For today, our
story stops there.
The interesting thing about this story
is God’s absence. We don’t often read very far in the Old Testament without
hearing something about God. Remember, these are God’s chosen people. This is
the story of the people who are to inherit the land, and settle. They are to
have children and grandchildren. They are to thrive and they are going to love
God and love them.
But in this story, God is quiet. Pastor
David Lewicki writes about God’s silence in the story:
“…
while no family I know is like Joseph’s, every family is weakened by the things
that weakened Joseph’s: generational dysfunction, parents working out their
unresolved issues in the lives of their children, and by love unevenly—even
unfairly—apportioned. Here’s another thing true of most every family I know: in
the midst of family struggles, it’s hard to tell if God is even paying attention.
Lewiki
goes onto to say this:
“Whatever
the situation with your family—whether you are Joseph in the pit, a brother
standing on the edge looking down, or Jacob, receiving back the bloody coat
that you never should have given—this story asks… no, it pleads with you to
trust. Trust that God’s
silence in your family is not the same as God’s absence. Trust that God has chosen this
family to be the bearers of God’s blessing, not only for this family, but for
your family, and for the whole world.
Source:
http://www.odysseynetworks.org/on-scripture-the-bible/dysfunctional-families-genesis-37-1-4-12-28/
Every family has a blessing, but right
now, the blessing seems far from this family. Could it be that this family has
drifted away from God? Have they
forgotten they are God’s chosen people.
Now, here is the thing. When we feel
separated from God, it is not because God has left us, it is either because we
have left God, or because God is quiet. But God never leaves our side. God
never leaves us. By the actions in this
story, it appears that many of the family members have fallen away from
listening to God. Because who would listen to God, and who would say a prayer
like this: “God guide my actions today, and let me live in your way” – and then
do the things we read about in this story.
Do you think these people were listening to God?
Would God have a parent show
favoritism? Would God have one child, who is almost a man, tell his siblings:
“I will rule over you”? Would God bless the plan of some brothers to throw
their annoying younger brother down a well and then sell him into slavery? No.
What about us and our families? I
wonder if we could take a fresh look at some of the conflicts that we
experience in our own families: sibling competition, fighting about how to care
for elderly parents, child custody after a divorce that becomes using the
children as pawns in adult conflicts, using guilt as a manipulator to get our
parents or our children to do what we want…I could go on all day with the list.
But you can just fill in the blanks
with your family conflicts.
We can’t control the actions of other
people. And that is beyond frustrating.
Trust me, I know. It is really frustrating.
All we can control is how we act, and how we react to the actions of
others. That’s all we have control over. And we can choose to let our actions
and reactions line up with the ways of God. To do that, we need to stay in
touch with God.
When family conflicts are out of
control, one really great move is to pray. (By the way, Praying is always a
great move.) Pray for yourself and for all the persons involved, even the ones
who are making you crazy. It can’t hurt and it might just help the situation.
Ask God to come into the situation. Ask God to be present and you can ask God
to not be silent. And then be quiet and listen to God.
As you pray, you might ask yourself,
what is the way of God in this situation for me? How would God call me to act?
You might want to meet with a trusted friend who also listens to God, and ask
them: How do you think God would act in this situation?
I don’t have the sense that Joseph and
his brothers were listening very closely to God during the time of this story.
I wonder how things might have gone differently for them if they had.
So, we know there are no perfect
families. We know that. But there are families who listen to God. My prayer is
that we are church of families that listen to God. We won’t be perfect, but we
will know that God is with us. And trust me, when we know God is with our
families, we will be blessed.
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