Audio for this homily is not available.

With the Rector on vacation, our Communications Director, David Kendrick, is preaching today, and has written the following.

Today, we meet the first dysfunctional family: the family of Jacob, who became Israel, the one who struggled with God and with humans (Genesis 32:28). Now, Jacob had two wives, two mistresses, 12 sons, and one daughter.

There’s plenty of parental and sibling abuse in this clan, which you can read in chapters 33-35 of Genesis. But today, we pick up the story in chapter 37, where we read that, “Israel loved Joseph more than any of his children, because he was the son of his old age.”

Perhaps Jacob also loved Joseph most because he was the son of Rachel, the wife that Jacob clearly preferred to Rachel’s sister, Leah, whom Jacob had been tricked into marrying.

But Rachel is now dead. Jacob is closer to his death than his birth, and so he places all his hopes for the future on this precocious boy, whom his older brothers no doubt picked on out of resentment. And Joseph is happy to return the favor:

Now Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers they hated him even more. He said to them...“Behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright. And behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf.”...So they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words.

So, when Israel sends Joseph out to his brothers in the field, their anger moves them to throw Joseph into a pit, to slowly starve to death. And as Joseph’s starvation begins, his brothers devolve from anger to callousness: “Then they sat down to eat.”

Finally, their callousness devolves into greed. Why kill their brother, when there is money to be made off of him? “And they drew Joseph up and lifted him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty shekels of silver. They took Joseph to Egypt.”

But lurking in all this human drama and betrayal is the God who blessed Jacob -- the man who cheated his own brother -- and promised him, “Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth…and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 28:14).

From Jacob and his 12 sons, including Joseph, come the 12 tribes of the nation of Israel. Those tribes will eventually make their way to Egypt, where they will briefly enjoy prosperity. Then they will be enslaved by the Egyptians. But years later, God will strike down the mightiest empire the world has known, and deliver the nation of Israel out of slavery in Egypt.

Then, in recognition of the God who has freed them, Israel will become the first Covenant Community, governed not by brute force, or emotional manipulation, but by a shared set of Root Values. And so, in the Covenant Community of St. David’s, the promise made to Jacob endures, even in spite of human weakness.

How does all this happen, with Joseph alone in Egypt, his brothers living with what they have done, and his Father inconsolable with grief. Join us for the next episode a week from today.