Sermons
September 27, 2026 (Proper 21)
Spoiled
Genesis 37:1-18
As it generally happens in the Narrative Lectionary, we’ve skipped quite a bit between last week’s reading and today’s.
Last week we met Abram, later to be called Abraham, and his wife Sarai, who became Sarah. They were living on a dead end street, elderly, no children, just a nephew they had taken into their home after his parents died. And God promised to make from them a great nation, even though they were both old enough to be on Medicare.
It took fully twenty-five years for that promise to be realized with the birth of Isaac.
Isaac married Rebekah and had twin sons, Jacob and Esau. Jacob was a bit of a weasel, and he tricked Esau out of birthright and blessing, and then had to run for his life because Esau swore he’d kill him for it.
At his uncle’s house, Jacob met Rachel, and it was love at first sight. Uncle Laban said they could marry, but Jacob would have to work for him for seven years first. Then on their wedding night, the trickster got tricked: Laban sent his older daughter Leah into Jacob’s bedroom instead of Rachel, and made Jacob work another seven years for Rachel. He ended up with two more secondary wives, and had thirteen children—twelve sons and a daughter.
We pick up today with Jacob’s second-youngest son, Joseph, who is seventeen at the time his story opens.
As we read the saga of the patriarchs and matriarchs, beginning with Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 12, the main thing we learn about this family is that they’re pretty dysfunctional. There’s a fair amount of jealousy, quarrelling, people going behind others’ backs, dirty tricks, and just plain bad behavior. Children play parents off against one another, and parents play favorites among their children.
In the case of Jacob’s family, the favoritism shown to the children mainly has to do with who their mothers are. Jacob has, as I mentioned a moment ago, two wives, sisters Leah and Rachel,[1] and two secondary wives,[2] Leah and Rachel’s servants Bilhah and Zilpah, and children by all four—although it took a very long time before his favorite, Rachel, was able to have any children at all. Rachel’s two sons are Joseph and Benjamin, and she dies bearing Benjamin.
At the time our story opens, Benjamin is too young to be a problem to his brothers, but Joseph is a real spoiled brat. He is his father’s favorite, and he knows it and seems never to pass up a chance to rub his older brothers’ noses in it. His father has made him a fancy coat, one whose design makes clear that its wearer is not expected to do any manual labor.[3] If his father sends him out to check on his brothers (he, of course, isn’t out there working with them), he tends to come back and tattle on them.
And to make matters worse, he has these dreams, in which he is lording it over his brothers. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he had kept the dreams to himself, but naturally he didn’t.
So that day when Joseph catches up with his brothers at Dothan, they have had quite enough of him, thank you very much; and they decide to give him a good scare. Initially, they plan to kill him outright, but then one of the older brothers speaks up and says, “Wait a minute.” He says, let’s just throw him into this pit—intending to rescue him later.
But while they’re having their dinner, ignoring Joseph calling out from the pit for somebody to get him out of there, they see a caravan of Ishmaelites, and decide the better course of action will be to sell him into slavery; that way they’re rid of him and get a little cash in their pockets. They decide to tell their father Jacob that Joseph was killed by wild animals.
That’s how Joseph ends up in Egypt, where the rest of his story takes place.
At first Joseph is a slave in Potiphar’s house; Potiphar is the captain of Pharaoh’s guard. And God is with him, blessing Potiphar and his household because Joseph is in it.
Funny thing is, the fact that God is with Joseph doesn’t mean nothing bad happens to him. In fact, he ends up thrown out of that household and into prison, after an incident in which Potiphar’s wife falsely accuses him of assaulting her.[4] Then it says that God is with Joseph in prison—he ends up with a fair amount of authority even there. His fellow inmates are the king’s chief baker and cupbearer; both have dreams that indicate their fate, which Joseph interprets for them. The baker ends up being executed, but the cupbearer is restored to his position, promising as he changes back into his street clothes that he will remember Joseph and try to get him released.
But when the cupbearer is free and back at work, he forgets all about Joseph, so Joseph is in prison another two years. Again, God being with a person might mean blessings for them and for others through them, but it doesn’t necessarily exempt that person from difficulties caused by others’ negligence or cruelty.
Joseph’s life has quite a few twists and turns to it over the thirteen chapters of Genesis[5] that contain his story. He’s finally sprung from jail after Pharaoh has a couple of disturbing dreams, causing his cupbearer finally to remember the young Hebrew he had met in prison, who interpreted his dream and that of the royal baker.
Joseph indicates that Pharaoh’s dreams predict seven years of abundant crops to be followed by seven years of crop failure. He recommends that the people be ordered to store up the extra abundance so they will have grain in the lean years. Pharaoh is so impressed with Joseph’s wisdom that he puts him in charge of the project, and ultimately he becomes second-in-command to Pharaoh over all of Egypt.
Then, two years into the famine[6]—which affected much more than just Egypt—Jacob in Canaan got wind that there was grain to be had in Egypt and sent his ten older sons to buy some. He keeps the youngest boy, Benjamin, at home to protect him in case something happens to the others. (Jacob is, it seems, still playing favorites.)
When the brothers arrive in Joseph’s presence, he recognizes them but they do not recognize him. He starts quizzing them about their family and discovers that their father is still living. He asks about their younger brother. Then he sends them on their way with an allotment of grain, and tell them they must bring Benjamin with them if they come again.
Jacob doesn’t want that to happen, but when the grain runs out and they have to go back to Egypt, they have no choice but to take him along. At this point Joseph hatches a plan, which appears to be so he can see whether they have grown beyond the way they were so many years before, as he has done. He has his servants put a silver chalice of his in Benjamin’s grain sack, then sends the authorities to intercept them on their way out of town, accusing them of theft. The bags are opened, the cup is found, and Joseph tells them the one in whose bag the cup was found will be enslaved as punishment.
Had they still been the same people they were when Joseph was seventeen, I presume, he figured they’d say, sure, keep the kid, he’s a brat anyway. But they didn’t. Instead, Judah begs Joseph to let him stay in Benjamin’s place, because it would kill their father to lose Benjamin after having lost Joseph so horribly all those years before.
Joseph had a lot of time to think after the events of today’s reading took place, when he was seventeen. He recognizes that, though God didn’t directly intervene in his life, God has definitely been with him, pushing here, tweaking there, until he finds himself in a position where a couple things happen.
First is that his boyhood dream comes true: his brothers did bow down to him, even though they didn’t at that moment realize they had. And second, he is able to return them good for the evil they did him so long ago. He becomes, in a sense, their savior.
The whole family moves into Egypt, to the land of Goshen where grazing land is abundant, and Pharaoh treats them well for Joseph’s sake. And God is with them in Egypt—which doesn’t stop another Pharaoh years later from doing their descendants harm. But even in the midst of that harm God is at work, and will bring them through it and back to the land he had promised them when he first spoke to Abraham.
[1] The story of how Jacob is tricked into marrying them both is found in Genesis 29.
[2] This is the more precise meaning of the Hebrew word often translated into English as concubine.
[3] Older translations call it a “coat of many colors”; newer ones like the NRSV call it a long-sleeved coat. In either case it is much too fancy to be worn while doing any of the hard work his other brothers would have been doing as they tended Jacob’s flocks.
[4] We must be careful when addressing this false accusation; statistics indicate a vanishing small number of assault accusations are, in fact, false. The issue here is harassment by someone with more power against someone with less, and the genders of the two people involved are not necessarily of primary importance.
[5] Joseph’s story begins with our reading for today from chapter 37, and continues to the end of the book, chapter 50, except for chapter 38, which is an interruption dealing with Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar, who eventually become the ancestors of both King David and Jesus.
[6] Genesis uses this word in a generic sense, to describe any period in which there is a crop failure due to drought or other naturally-occurring event. Social scientists today reserve the term famine to refer to a food crisis that begins with a naturally-occurring crop failure and is aggravated by physical or social forces. The failure of the potato crops in Ireland in the 1840s, for instance, should not have caused the mass starvation that it did; there was plenty of food in Ireland, but the English colonial rulers exported the other crops rather than sharing them with the native Irish.