Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost August 9, 2026 with The Rev. Dr. Cathy Deats

https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp14_RCL.html

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:47

God grant that your word only may be spoken, that your word only may be heard for Christ's sake. Amen. Friends, enemies. Put them together and you get frenemies. Heard that word before, frenemies. A frenemy can be an enemy disguised as a friend or also a close acquaintance who's a competitor or a rival. Think Batman and Catwoman. Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed. Mozart and Salieri. Any two members of Congress? Frenemies. These relationships can have benefits to each other, but they're also highly competitive and full of risk and mistrust. But I want you to know the Bible is full of frenemies, starting with the book of Genesis. Think Cain and Abel, Abraham and Lot, Sarah and Hagar, Esau and Jacob, Jacob and Laban, now Joseph and his brothers. Notice how often that frenemies are members of the same family. Thomas Mann, who wrote a novel about the retelling of the Jacob story, said, Genesis is a book about dysfunctional families. Families seem to breed frenemies. Now the frenemy factor becomes especially clear near the end of Genesis when the rivalry among the twelve children, the twelve sons of Jacob, comes to a climax. You know the story. We just heard a good part of it. Joseph loved one of his sons more than the rest. Seventeen-year-old Joseph. Because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a robe with long sleeves. Now you can imagine how this all went over with his brothers. When his brothers saw that the father loved him more than them, they hated him. They couldn't speak peaceably to them, to him, they said. So no brotherly love there, just brotherly hate. Joseph and his brothers should love each other, should at least be friendly, but instead their relationship is full of envy and violence and hatred. They were frenemies. This antagonism boils over one day when Dad Jacob, also known as Israel, sends Joseph to the fields where his brothers are working for a report back, kind of a supervisory evaluation or a tattletale trip. The brothers see Joseph from a distance, and their hatred comes to the front and they immediately conspire to kill him. But even among themselves, they can't come up with a unanimous opinion because Brother Reuben convinces them not to kill him, but simply to throw him in a pit. So they grab Joseph, tear off his precious coat, and throw him in the pit. Then it says they sit down to eat. Thomas Mann was right. Genesis is a book about dysfunctional families. So as the brothers are sitting there enjoying their lunch, they see a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, carrying a load of merchandise to Egypt. And Brother Judah says this Brothers, what are we going to get out of killing our brother and concealing the evidence? Let's see him to the Ishmaelites, but let's not kill him. Let's sell him. He is, after all, our brother, our own flesh and blood. So the brothers agree. They pull Joseph out of the pit, take on twenty pieces of silver, and hand them over to the Ishmaelites, who take him off to Egypt. What drives this exchange is the power of the phrenemy factor. Joseph was their own flesh, but his brothers hated him. They were part of the same family, but resentful and competitive. In his book Family and Pastoral Care, Herbert Anderson writes that probably in no other context of human life does our sinfulness show as clearly as it does in the family. Selling Joseph into slavery made perfect sense. They got rid of him because he was the favorite, and they despised him because of that. Hate leads to bad behavior, and hate can make us do some outrageous things. According to the Washington Post some years ago, psychologists who studied social science behind hatred found evidence that we people are hardwired to judge each other. Further research says it takes just seven seconds for your brain to form an opinion of someone. Some studies suggest that people judge traits like trustworthiness, competence, likability in under one second. We know this because we do this. We make judgments of people all the time. Coworkers, neighbors, classmates, strangers, friends, enemies, frenemies. Often our judgments are harshest towards people closest to us. Maybe we resent or envy their advantages. We label them undesirable and try to knock them down to build ourselves up. Hate can feel so good, but it's a fast burning emotion. And deep down we know what it's consuming is our spirit. So what do we do about hate? Look at Joseph. Joseph discovers the answer many years later, after he's risen to power in Egypt. In a time of great famine in the region, people from many neighboring countries were coming to Egypt to buy grain because they were starving. And the crowd included ten of Joseph's brothers. But they don't recognize Joseph, who's now governor of the entire land, and the reason why Egypt has enough food to feed everyone. But Joseph recognizes his brothers and initially treats them like strangers, speaks harshly to them, and accuses them of being spies. You can't blame him. After all, they stripped him, threw him in a pit, and sold him into slavery. But Joseph decides to test them by asking them to return home with a load of grain and bring back their youngest brother Benjamin. He says, Bring your youngest brother to me, and I will know that you're not spies, but honest men. So they do it. And then Joseph reveals himself to his brothers, saying, I am your brother Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. But don't feel badly. Don't blame yourselves for selling me. God was behind it. God sent me here ahead of you to save lives. Joseph has a discovery there's a power at work in his life bigger and stronger than hatred. And although the brothers clearly intended to do him harm, God intended it for good in order to preserve the people of Israel. So God transformed an act of hatred into love. He took that horrible misdeed and used it to start a chain of events that would save a lot of people. And when Joseph recognizes that that's happened, the hatred between himself and his brothers is extinguished with an act of forgiveness. Joseph realizes the rule of God is much more important than getting even with his brothers. Forgiveness, that can work in this way today as well. We can use it whenever a coworker undermines us or a friend disappoints us, someone gossips about us, or a partner hurts us. Forgiveness doesn't gloss over the offense, it has to be maimed, as Joseph did, when he said to his brothers, You intended to do harm to me. But it was equally important to release them from the offense, as Joseph did when he promised to care for them. You have nothing to fear, he said. I'll take care of you and your children. He reassured them, speaking to them heart to heart. To tell the truth and to release from guilt. These are the actions that can kill the power of hatred. In God's hands, any intended evil becomes eventual good. That's the heart of Joseph's story. Nothing in the story glosses over the presence of evil. Blood, tears, betrayal, they're everywhere. And over and over again, God redeemed the evil and the pain. The torn robe became a royal robe. The pit became a palace. And the broken family grew old together. You meant evil against me, Joseph told his brothers. He used a Hebrew verb, Hasav, whose root is to weave. To weave. You wove evil, he was saying, but God rewove it together for good. God the master weaver. The brothers had twisted dark threads of jealousy and betrayal, but God didn't rip it apart or destroy the threads or erase them. Instead, he took the exact same threads and rewove them into a life-saving design. This is the true meaning of providence. The transformation of an evil crime into divine redemption, the transformation of any evil act into divine redemption. God will use our messes for good. Joseph's pit was a cistern. Maybe ours is a diagnosis, a foster home, traumatic injury, the death of a beloved. Joseph was thrown into a hole. Maybe some of us were abandoned in another way, in a divorce, or unemployment, or abuse. We are the versions of Joseph in our own generation. We carry the Spirit of God within us. We can't always see what God is doing, but we can assume that God is up to something good. Amen.