August 17, 2008 | 8:00 a.m.

Brothers

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 133
Genesis 45:1–15

“How very good and pleasant it is
when kindred live together in unity!”

Psalm 133:1 (NRSV)

So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother and sister and then come and offer your gift.

Matthew 5:23–24 (NRSV)

When I went to college, I joined a fraternity. At Wabash College, about 80 percent of the students pledged a fraternity, so most freshmen began their college experience by going through the rush process, which felt like a big choice we were all making about the next four years of our lives, deciding whom we would live and study and grow with, who would be our “brothers.”

It was not until I was almost through four years of college that it dawned on me that in rush, a choice was actually made for me. Most of the guys in my pledge class, guys who have since then become some of the greatest friends of my life, are not at all the kind of guys I ever would have chosen to spend time with had anyone left it up to me. But by going through that rush process, I allowed an older group of guys who didn’t know me that well to essentially choose for me who my pledge class would be, who my “brothers” would be. With my pledge brothers, I had some of the biggest fights and greatest frustrations of my life; I learned a tremendous amount about myself; I tested many of the assumptions I had about what was right and wrong; and I underwent some significant changes as a young man, and that happened mostly, I believe, in the way that it did because I did not choose those friends. And I came to believe that those twenty guys were quite aptly called my “brothers” because if there’s one thing that is true about brothers, it’s that you don’t get to choose them.

It occurs to me that one of the things about life that causes us the greatest anxiety, and perhaps the greatest anger or frustration, are those places in life where we find ourselves in undesirable circumstances that were not of our choosing. A job ends because of cutbacks. A relationship ends because the other person wants out. The sentiment at such times seems to be, “I did not choose this, but somehow I find myself here.”

It can be a feeling of such helplessness, these times when we seem to have no choices or when a choice is made for us. Getting back to the topic of brothers, imagine with me, those of you who happen to have a brother, like I do, what life might be like if your brother made your choices for you. I have a brother, I love my brother very much, but we’re two different people, and when it comes to life’s major decisions, I’ll choose my own path, thank you very much. That’s probably how most of us feel.

So consider Joseph, the man we meet in Genesis this morning. His story is one of the great ones in the Bible: there’s betrayal, sex, political intrigue, dysfunctional family dynamics, famine, imprisonment—you name it. If it’s an element of a good story, it’s found in this last few chapters of the book of Genesis. And there’s a catalyst that starts the whole story: 2,500 years ago, someone who wrote down this story knew that if you wanted to get a really good story going about this guy Joseph, a story that is really true to life in all it’s messiness, a story that takes us into the depths of what it is to live a life we do not choose, the author would need to let us know that Joseph had a brother. So the author does us one better than that: Joseph has eleven brothers.

Joseph is seventeen years old where the story picks up. Out of the twelve sons of Jacob, Joseph, it says, is the favorite, and he knows it. One day, Joseph is sent out to his brothers who are tending the flocks, and maybe his brothers are feeling a little extra jealous because Jacob has bought Joseph a beautiful new cloak, and perhaps Joseph is even gloating about it, and they beat up Joseph and throw him into a pit, and when a caravan comes by carrying slaves down to Egypt, Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery. Then they smear some goat’s blood on his cloak and they go home, and Jacob concludes that his favorite son was killed by a wild animal. When I was a kid and gloated about something, my older brother would sometimes hold me up against the bed or the wall before he started hitting me because he knew it would hurt more that way. Until I read the Joseph story, I didn’t know just how good I had it.

As it turns out though, Joseph has kind of a knack for landing on his feet, and as slave life goes, he does rather well in Egypt, rising to the position of managing the house of one of Pharaoh’s officials. Just when things seem to be going so well, the wife of that official tries to get Joseph to sleep with her, and when he refuses, she tells everyone he raped her, and Joseph winds up in jail.

Well, Joseph lands on his feet again. A famine hits the land, and Joseph, who has always had a knack for interpreting dreams, is able to help Pharaoh save Egypt by interpreting his dream correctly, and Joseph becomes Pharaoh’s right hand man, in charge of all of the crops in the land of Egypt, while all the surrounding people continue to live out the famine.

At this point, something happens that you don’t always see in the Bible: what goes around comes around. Finally, many years after that fateful day out herding sheep, Jacob’s sons, devastated by the famine in their land, go to Egypt looking for food, and who do they have to beg from in order to get it but Joseph.

It’s been so many years and the situation is so unexpected that Joseph’s brothers don’t even recognize him, and the part of the story I read to you today is the part where, after some significant hemming and hawing about it, Joseph finally reveals himself to his brothers.

The Bible doesn’t tell us much about Joseph’s emotional state as he encounters his brothers; we don’t know exactly what he was feeling. But it does tell us what Joseph does. At first he keeps his identity a secret. Joseph has a significant power advantage over his brothers, because he’s the one who has the food, but he then increases that advantage by deceiving his brothers. Over the course of their two visits to Egypt, spanning at least a few months, Joseph keeps asking his steward to put his brothers’ money back in their sacks after they buy grain, and he hides his special cup in their sacks as well, to make it look like they’re stealing from him. To take it a step further, he sets it up so that, in order to make things right, they’re going to have to sell their youngest brother, Benjamin, into slavery under Joseph.

Now, like I said, the Bible tells us little about Joseph’s emotional state, but I think it’s fair to assume that there is a part of him that really wants to get even. And he goes most of the way down that path, right up until these few verses in the part of the story I read to you today, when Joseph reveals who he is:

Joseph could no longer control himself before all those who stood by him, and he cried out, “Send everyone away from me.” So no one stayed with him when Joseph made himself known to his brothers. And he wept so loud that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it. Joseph said to his brothers, “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?” But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence. Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Come closer to me.” He said, “I am your brother, Joseph, who you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.”

Can you imagine what it must have taken for Joseph to say that? It’s one of the darkest stories about brotherhood you would ever want to hear. And yet the emphasis in the story never seems to be on the awful things these brothers do to one another—the treachery and the deceit, the jealousy and the brokenness. The story seems almost to tacitly accept that people—even brothers—will sometimes do dreadful things, things that land us in places we would never choose for ourselves. Importantly, the place where God’s name enters the story is where someone, against the odds, does make a choice. Joseph makes a choice, a very difficult choice, for forgiveness so that life can be preserved. “God sent me before you,” Joseph says, “to preserve life.”

We live in a world that is inundated by the themes of the Joseph story. In Northern Ireland, new generations live into a world of violence that none of them created but that few of them can seem to forgive. As a pastor who hears a lot about families, I can assure you that there are few stories more common and more upsetting than the ones of family members, brothers and sisters or parents and children, who no longer communicate because, though they can barely remember what they started fighting about, they simply cannot seem to forgive. What are we to do?

I want to tell you three stories from beyond the Joseph story.

In 1947, President Harry Truman visited Mexico. He made an unscheduled stop at the gravesite of six Mexican soldiers who, almost 100 years before, had killed themselves rather than surrender to the American army. In an act of contrition, Truman laid a wreath on the monument and bowed his head in silence, asking forgiveness for the violence that had snuffed out those young lives who were fighting against America. The news of that act was huge in Mexico. “A cab driver told an American reporter, ‘To think that the most powerful man in the world would come to apologize.’” He wanted to cry himself, the driver said. A prominent Mexican engineer was quoted: “One hundred years of misunderstanding and bitterness wiped out by one man in one minute. This is the best neighbor policy” (Donald Shriver, An Ethic for Enemies, p. 221).

Here’s another story: A few months ago, a pastor friend of mine got a call from a woman she didn’t know. “My father is dying,” she said. “He wants to talk to his son, my brother, but they haven’t spoken in eighteen years. He wants to know if you can help.” Some calls were placed and arrangements were made, and a week later my friend sat in a room with that father and son. They forgave one another. They both wept. No one in that family had been to church in years, but somehow that sister knew that the church was the place to go in order to start her brother and father on the path to forgiveness. Maybe that’s because of this third story:

Many years ago, a man who was condemned to die sat around a dinner table with his friends. They had traveled together; they had laughed and wept together; they had prayed together. Some might say they were brothers. And as they sat at that table, that man who would soon lose his life without ever committing a crime, took bread and said to his brothers, “This is my body, which is being broken for you, and this cup is the promise sealed in my blood that your sins are forgiven.” And then he shared that bread and that cup with his brothers. He shared it with the one who would betray him and the one who would deny him and the rest of them, who would run and hide to save their own lives.

We share that same meal here today, remembering that time, long ago, when Jesus reminded his brothers of a story that had been written long ago in the book of Genesis, a story about a man named Joseph, a story about a God who forgives even at great cost, because that is what is required in order to preserve life.

Amen.