Life Goes On

Dr. Jon Burnham preached this sermon from Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28
on August 10, 2008 (OT19a) at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Houston

It has been said that struggle comes to every person. Just live long enough and it will come, perhaps again, to you. But the Spirit is with us in the middle of our struggles, great or small. The great American poet, Robert Frost, wisely said: "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on." Yield yourself now to the loving, leading presence of God's spirit, as you listen to God's Word to you today in the story of Joseph and his bullying brothers.

A teenage boy named Joseph heard God speaking to him in his dreams. He dreamed about God and himself and his family. He described his dreams to his brothers. He said, "Listen to this dream I had. We were all out in the field gathering bundles of wheat. All of a sudden my bundle stood straight up and your bundles circled around it and bowed down to mine." Now what do you think about that? His brothers reply, "So! You're going to rule us? You're going to boss us around?" And they hated him more than ever because of his dreams and the way he talked.
   
Joseph was a mystic and God eventually used Joseph's mystical vision to make him the King of Egypt's right hand man. When Joseph matures, his ability to interpret dreams will save his family and an entire nation after he envisions a coming famine and leads Egypt through the crisis. But here in our text today, Joseph's mystical vision is just dawning, just beginning. Young Joseph was starting to see something inside himself that is inside each of us although we seldom see it. Other mystics have seen it. Here is how a contemporary Christian, Thomas Merton, describes this mystical "something inside us":

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely .... I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere. (A Call to Contemplation, 61)

Joseph had this kind of seeing. His visions came from God shining within. He saw the gate of heaven everywhere. He awkwardly tried to explain this kind of seeing to his brothers. Eugene Peterson has an accessible interpretation of this story in his translation of the Bible called The Message:

 Joseph said to them: "I dreamed another dream—the sun and moon and eleven stars bowed down to me!"

When he told it to his father and brothers, his father reprimanded him: "What's with all this dreaming? Am I and your mother and your brothers all supposed to bow down to you?" Now his brothers were really jealous; but his father brooded over the whole business.

Joseph's father then sent him off on an errand to visit his brothers. Joseph took off, tracked his brothers down, and found them in Dothan.

They spotted him off in the distance. By the time he got to them they had cooked up a plot to kill him. The brothers were saying, "Here comes that dreamer. Let's kill him and throw him into one of these old cisterns; we can say that a vicious animal ate him up. We'll see what his dreams amount to."

Reuben heard the brothers talking and intervened to save him, "We're not going to kill him. No murder. Go ahead and throw him in this cistern out here in the wild, but don't hurt him." Reuben planned to go back later and get him out and take him back to his father.

When Joseph reached his brothers, they ripped off the fancy coat he was wearing, grabbed him, and threw him into a cistern. The cistern was dry; there wasn't any water in it.

Then they sat down to eat their supper. Looking up, they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites on their way from Gilead, their camels loaded with spices, ointments, and perfumes to sell in Egypt. Judah said, "Brothers, what are we going to get out of killing our brother and concealing the evidence? Let's sell him to the Ishmaelites, but let's not kill him—he is, after all, our brother, our own flesh and blood." His brothers agreed.

By that time the Midianite traders were passing by. His brothers pulled Joseph out of the cistern and sold him for twenty pieces of silver to the Ishmaelites who took Joseph with them down to Egypt.

Joseph was bullied by his brothers. Some of us know the feeling. We have been bullied at home, at work, or at school. Here is the story of one teenage boy who was bullied in high school, as described in the book And Words Can Hurt Forever.

    Nathan never goes to his high school library. When Nathan was a freshman, he made his way to the library on several occasions with the good intentions of a new student beginning his high school career. He knew that good grades were important to his parents, to himself, and for his future. On each and every occasion, he was met outside the doorway by a group who claimed that spot as their territory in the building. They owned it; they had power there.

    To get into the library, Nathan had to first get through a series of taunts about being a nerd, then get past a volley of objects being thrown at him. Nathan was an athlete; he was capable and strong on the field. But he was not "strong enough" to deal with the ridicule and bullying of his peers, so Nathan stopped using the library. The culture that denigrated him for trying to do his best infiltrated the rest of his high school experience. Though he was quite bright, Nathan's low grades reflected this poisoning of his social experience at school.

    Where were the teachers, staff, and other administrators when Nathan was facing this emotional abuse ? Why was this g group of bullies allowed to prevail, making each student run an emotional gauntlet before reaching the inner sanctum of the library? The answer is that Nathan attended a very large high school, and the staff at this school did not consider hallway supervision as apart of their "professional role."

    In their work about keeping school safe, Ron Avi Astor, heather Mayer, and William Behre while at the University of Michigan focused on the ways in which schools have many "unowned spaces"--places that are not supervised by adults or occupied by positive, community-minded students. Students are all aware of where the dangerous places are in the building and on the campus, and some take advantage of the opportunities to bully others. Children are particularly vulnerable in the hallways.

    Most kids will bear up under this kind of emotional violence. But some children who are not as resilient will experience psychological damage. The damage can include (but is not limited to) shame, lessened self-esteem, impaired self-image, and learned helplessness. The basic components of learned helplessness are the beliefs that one has no control over what is happening, that  a bad event will continue to recur, and that nothing can effectively happen to change the situation. As a result of these damaging perceptions, kids begin to make important choices that hurt  them academically and socially, perhaps in ways that affect the rest of their lives.

    As we see in the case of Nathan, kids who are ridiculed by peers for their attempts academically may begin to make choices that result in lower grades or reduced academic interest. Kids who are degraded by their peers can end up with shaky self-confidence, damaged self-image and self-esteem. It is not easy to buck the culture of your peers if you are being tormented for being different.

    As adults, sometimes we tend to thinks, "Students, especially teenagers, should stand up for themselves. They need to fight for what is important to them." While that sentiment has some merit, we must always be humble about matters like this. How difficult is it for adults to stand up or to stand out? On some job sites, the eager or quick workers are told by the rest, "Slow down. You're making the rest of look bad." How can we expect children to do something that most adults cannot do? Adults will tolerate racists or sexist comments at work, even when they find them offensive, because the social costs of objecting are high. Do we expect more of our kids than we do of ourselves? (And Words Can Hurt Forever: How to Protect Adolescents from Bullying, Harassment, and Emotional Violence, James Garbarine and Ellen deLara, p. 24-25)

Dorothy E. Minck describes a childhood experience when she learned a bit of wisdom from her grandmother.

In my grandmother's garden a rosebud seemed such a long time unfolding that I grew impatient, wanting to see its color and beauty. I thought we should do something about it, and appealed to Grandmother. When she told me to unfold the petals, I was thrilled. But after the petals were unfolded there was no beautiful full-blown rose such as I had visioned. I had destroyed its beauty, and the rose quickly withered and died. Grandmother then explained that it was thus with all things--we must let them unfold in their own way and in their own time. (Dorothy E. Minck, cited in Everyday Greatness: Insights and Commentary by Stephen R. Covey)

Nathan was bullied and he lost touch with his dreams. His spirit was stunted like the beautiful rose whose petals were picked too soon and quickly withered and died. In contrast, like a beautiful rose, young Joseph persevered in the face of bullying and his inner beauty unfolded in its own way in its own time. Joseph plodded along even when his brothers bullied him. For Joseph saw what Nathan could not see. Joseph saw that God was with him and within him. He kept on going with God and it eventually took him higher than anyone would have expected him to go. Thanks to Joseph's perseverance and God's grace, Joseph's dreams manifested in reality.

"The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing," said Marcus Aurelius. Joseph knew how to wrestle and he knew how to dance. More than anything, Joseph was a dreamer. May God give our young boys and girls visions and our older men and women dreams. May God grant us the courage to face bullies and the hope that even in the face of struggle, life goes on. For we know from the story of Joseph that even if we are bullied by our own family, we shall overcome some day.