The man who was my surrogate father here in Canada had a saying that for when people do things that just run against the grain of anything resembling common sense. He would say, “There’s nothing stranger than people.” When we, “people”, display our tendency to show our backsides as our best sides, things can certainly become bizarre. He would say that and often I would tack on “…except for maybe family.” Over the years, I’ve just seen more than a fair share of dysfunctional families and have concluded that quite often the reason that people can be “people” is the coop from which they flew, their family.
The family we grew up in shapes who we are in so many ways. There’s the simple biology of it. We inherit personality traits. Families will also pass behavioural and relational patterns from one generation to another. It’s in the family unit that we generally form our ideas and instincts of what’s “normal”.
When it comes to our own personal identities, the core components of what I call ‘me” are shaped by significant events in our families and how our families dealt with them. More often than not, those significant events weren’t the times when our families were behaving the way families ought to, but rather when our families were behaving the way a family ought not behave. I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to say that “there’s nothing stranger than people” because people have been hurt by their families, by the very people whom they should have been able to trust. The breach of the core bond of family affects us profoundly.
Take the family of the patriarch Jacob for example. We have to ask here, “What would make a group of brothers want to conspire to kill one of their brothers but after talking themselves down from that, sell him to slave traders?” This vignette of a broken family being in the Bible may shock us particularly if we believe that biblical families should be ideal families. But, guess what? You won’t find Ward, June, Wally, and the Beaver in the Bible nor the Walton’s nor the Brady’s. The overwhelming majority of the families in the Bible show us honest to goodness broken families at work…and…God working through them.
In this case, Jacob’s family is a complicated blended family built on polygamy. Jacob had two wives and two concubines by whom he sired twelve sons and one daughter. His wives, Leah and Rachel, were sisters who were constant rivals for his affection. Of the four women, he loved the younger sister, Rachel, the most. His two sons by her, Joseph and Benjamin, were his favourites; especially Joseph. Jacob displayed his favouritism by giving Joseph a very nice multi-coloured robe; techni-coloured as the story goes on Broadway. His favouritism set in place the terrible family dynamic of the ten other sons having to do the work of shepherding Jacob’s flocks while Joseph did little else to nothing besides be a precocious dreamer and…spy on his brothers for their father for they were known in the area as trouble makers. Thusly and so, his brothers despised him.
Things between Joseph and his brothers really got tense after two dreams that Joseph had that he was quick to smugly recount to his family. He was excited by the dreams and believed that by them God was telling him he was destined for greatness. In the first dream, he and his brothers were binding wheat sheaves. The sheaf he was working on arose upright while the sheaves of his brothers bowed to it. His brothers reacted by hating him more. In the second dream, the sun, moon, and eleven stars bowed down to him. This one caught Jacob’s eye. Jacob asked, “Shall your mother and I and your brothers come to bow down to the earth before you?” Jacob suspected that the God of his fathers, Isaac and Abraham, had destined Joseph to greatness. This dream reinforced that. But his brothers, they were now moved to a jealous hatred of Joseph. As you likely suspect, this does not bode well; parents playing favourites with their children makes sibling rivalry all the more caustic.
The day soon came, the fateful day that changed everything. Joseph’s brothers were pasturing the flock in a place called Shechem and this was a concern to Jacob. The brothers had had trouble with the Shechemites before. A son of the first family of Shechem had raped their sister Dinah. The father of the young man tried to make peace and agreed to have all the men of the village circumcised so that they could intermarry. Unbeknownst to Jacob, as the Shechemite men lay around sore, two of Dinah’s full brothers, Simeon and Levi, killed the young man while the rest of the brothers pillaged the village. Having that history, Jacob figured he should make sure that his sons were not causing further trouble with the Shechemites, so he sent Joseph to go see what they were up to - that old “go spy on your brothers and come back and tattle” thing.
Joseph responds to Jacob’s assignment in the words that a prophet would respond to a call from God. He says, “Here I am.” A seasoned reader of the Old Testament knows that when someone says “Here I am” in a Bible story, God is about to make something significant happen. And just a heads up, there are some words and phrases in the next few verses we need to pay attention to because they mean more than their face value.
Joseph set out and reached the area of Shechem, but he doesn’t find his brothers. He doesn’t find what he’s looking for and therefore can’t carryout his father’s wishes. Joseph can’t find his brothers and we have to assume that he knows it would be big trouble if the story he takes back to his father is that they aren’t where they are supposed to be. He had gotten them in trouble before and they got bitter. Dare he do it again?
So, he starts to ponder and to wander aimlessly, purposelessly. Wander is an important word in the Bible usually used when someone is wandering away from God, but here its reflective of the aimless wandering that comes about when our own dreams of purpose have fallen through. Joseph is wandering about searching for some sign of where his brothers might be and all the while mulling over his options. I suspect that he’s probably lost in thought as to the meaning of the dreams he had about his family bowing down to him and how that’s now going to happen if his brothers have vamoosed. Please take a moment and visualize this. Here’s a young adult of 17 wandering around on the hillsides of Shechem, looking lost, and decked out in a multi-coloured robe. That sounds like me back in 1983 in my new wave/punk rock phase.
But anyway, along comes “some man”. Whenever “some man” shows up in a Bible story, he’s usually a Godsend, someone God is using to get you going in the right direction. In my life, in my late teens, it was my Dad who got me heading towards the ministry when I was lost and looking for direction.
True to the task of what “some man” is supposed to do in a Bible story, the man asks Joseph “What are you seeking?” The word “seeking” is significant. It is almost always used to mean seeking God. “Seek the Lord while he may be found.” It isn’t just that Joseph is earnestly seeking his brothers. He is seeking what the God who gave him those dreams has for him and his brothers are an important part of that. If his brothers have disappeared on a permanent basis, those dreams might not play out. So often, our calling from God has to get sorted out in the context of our family relationships.
Well, the man tells him he heard his brothers say they were going to the area of Dothan. This is interesting because Dothan is on the main north/south highway for international trade. We may want to think here that the reason they left Shechem was that they were taking the flocks and running away because they had no intention of bowing down to Joseph. You see, they too know those dreams were a revelation from God concerning his purpose for Joseph, and they want nothing of it.
Joseph heads to Dothan and they see him in his multi-coloured robe coming from a distance. “From a distance” is a metaphorically loaded phrase when describing family relationships. Too often in our families, we just don’t know each other and only see each other “from a distance”. We have our opinions about our family members, but our opinions of our family members aren’t who they really are. The tendency is that we tend to hide ourselves from those closest to us. Too often the depth of our knowledge of who the people in our families is just our predictions of how they will behave rather than on actually having sat down and listened to who they believe themselves to be.
In my family, my brother was the oldest of my siblings and I was the youngest. I had opinions about my brother and could make predictions about how he would behave in everyday situations that were based on his forcing me to wait on him hand and foot and getting pummelled the one time I refused to get him that bowl of Capt. Crunch. But that was seeing him from a distance. We were brothers but we never drew close enough to have deep, personal conversations about our lives. Those conversations came after we left home.
Joseph drew close to them. That’s also metaphorical. They caught a glimpse of who their brother Joseph was and the purpose God had for him because of the dreams. Sadly, they wanted nothing to do with it because of their opinions, their distant knowledge of Joseph. The dreams only fed into their negative opinions of him formed by their father playing favourites.
Only able to have the distant opinions of Joseph now complicated by those dreams, they conspire to kill him. We must see the contrast here between what Joseph is up to in that moment and what they are up to. Joseph was seeking his brothers because he realized they played a role in what God had planned for him. But, the brothers were conspiring to kill him for what God was up to in Joseph. They took to heart their opinions about Joseph rather than saw him for who he was – a precocious, and very gifted young man whom their God had big plans for. They just saw a dreamer and a smug little snot who always got their father’s affections before them, the ones who did all the work. They just wanted to be done with him and here was an opportunity that they just couldn’t let pass them by. Joseph was alone and vulnerable and they were far from home. Fortunately, instead of killing him they sold him to slave traders.
Family dynamics are too often a tough row to hoe. Family can be supportive and nurturing but also just as much hurtful, harmful, and debilitating when family members start acting like “people”. These dysfunctional dynamics become even more complicated when God’s plans for our lives enter the picture.
Looking back on my own life to when I was Joseph’s age, it was one thing for me to start going to church by my own decision and totally another when I started talking in terms of sensing God wanted my to go into the ministry. Like Jacob my father had a sense that God was calling me, but the rest of my family could only see me from a distance and were quite concerned. They knew me as being shy and having difficulty speaking my mind. They knew the politics of ministry might eat me up and were rightfully concerned; concern, which to me in my opinions from a distance about them, felt like discouragement to do what I felt called to do. Surprisingly, part of the preparation for ministry that God put me through was the task of having those difficult but healing conversations with family members that served to draw us closer. Like Joseph seeking his brothers, my seeking to know my parents and my siblings for who they were as persons was a crucial part of what it was for me to seek God and know God’s unconditional love, grace, and forgiveness, and to know the freedom of letting go of hurt and grudges so that I might grow into who God wanted me to be.
Jacob’s family and the story of Joseph teaches us a valuable lesson or two or three. First, God in love and grace still works in and through family dysfunction. We don’t have to come from the Cleaver family or the Walton family or the Brady Bunch for God to work in and through us.
Second, family ties are such that we are so close that we can’t really see each other for who we are. No one knows us better than our family, but too often what we know of each other is little more than distant opinions. We have to do the hard work of communicating and sharing ourselves in the midst of our families.
Lastly, the family can no doubt be a relational dynamic that kills our spirits. Our “from a distance” opinions about our family members truly can lead us to conspire against and hurt family members. Therefore, we should take the difficult road of opening our eyes to and for the members of our families to look for what God is doing in the lives of each them. It is in supporting God’s work in our families to make us each the person God wants us to be that our families find wholeness and health. Amen.
