Bringing Your Brother

August 19, 1990

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Scripture: “You shall not see my face, unless your brother is with you.”  Genesis 43:5

“You shall not see my face, unless your brother is with you.” The brother being referred to here of course, is little Benjamin, but with just a little imagination it could be any brother....or sister. In fact, without MUCH more imagination, it could be EVERY brother and sister. The issue eventually is ONENESS in the human community, the indissoluble bond that binds us, how closely tied together we all are.

I spent 3 full days on this passage before I ever got down to serious writing..... 3 full days, scribbling and tearing up, wrestling with it, agonizing over how to twist it to make it say what I wanted it to say.  Now that I’ve confessed it, I feel better.....if the guilt doesn’t go entirely away, I may confess even more.

Actually, preachers do that sometimes, I guess you know, when the conscience permits them and desperation pushes them..... twist a passage, I mean.... but it’s not fundamentally honest, and, besides, this time, I couldn’t make it work, anyway.

It’s a perfect text for what I want to say, and even a perfect text for what I believe the Bible wants to say, and does say, essentially, in other places, BUT IN THE CONTEXT, ALAS, THE WRONG PERSON SAYS IT.

“You shall not see my face, unless your brother is with you.” IF ONLY IT HAD BEEN GOD SPEAKING INSTEAD OF JOSEPH. After 3 days of trying to come at it from this angle, and from that angle, nothing fitting correctly, I just gave up and decided my only expedience was to lift that sucker out of context.

It’s been done before, I remind you, and by better people than I. Every time at a wedding when someone uses that magnificent, luxurious passage from Ruth---you know the one---Entreat me not to leave thee, Or to refrain from following after thee. For whither thou goest, I will go.....etc., we generously overlook that in the story the words are spoken not between lovers, but between a young woman and her mother-in-law. OUT OF CONTEXT, THEY HAVE A WIDER APPLICATION.

And when we recite that lovely benediction, the Mizpah Benediction, “May the Lord watch between thee and me when we are absent one from another” ..... beautiful sentiment, beautiful wording... we tend to forget that when it was first uttered, it was the scoundrel Laban speaking to the rascally Jacob, and what he was saying was, “Listen, brother, when you’re out of my sight, and I can’t personally keep an eye on you, just remember that God will be watching you, and don’t even think about trying to pull something.” THE CONTEXT ITSELF SOMETIMES BLURS THE POSSIBILITIES.

Well...same way here. The text is bigger than the context. And maybe, after all, that’s sort of what inspiration is....GETTING MORE THAN YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE GETTING, extracting even more than was deposited. It’s why the Bible is so incredibly inexhaustible....poke around in some passages for years....you STILL keep bumping into new treasure.... some new insight, some new relationship, some new pertinence.... Suddenly it just reaches out and grabs you.

Here the immediate context is a story about FAMILY SOLIDARITY----we’ll stay with it a while before we move up and out, because on THIS level there’s some pretty good stuff. It’s a story in context about the tragedy of separating the family, disrupting the community--“you shall not see my face, unless your brother is with you.” It’s a story about INCLUSIVENESS, which says that until everybody is on board, until the entire family is present and accounted for, until ALL the brothers and sisters are included, there can be no genuine blessing for anyone. Even on that level the seeds of wider implication are present.

Can you picture the scene in your imagination? The Joseph saga, all the way through, is filled with emotion, high drama. It’s one of the longest continuing stories in the whole Bible. Joseph appears first in Chapter 35 of Genesis, and essentially holds center stage until the end of the book, 15 chapters later..... Simply as narrative, simply for the plot alone, it’s a ripping, good story.

And this moment is an especially emotional moment a heart-pounding moment, if you please, as brother and brothers, so long separated, come face to face again. Only Joseph, as yet, has made the recognition.

But suddenly there they are....out of the blue, out of his past...his 10 older brothers, his own flesh and blood, his own kin.... they don’t know him yet---they think he’s an Egyptian official---BUT HE KNOWS THEM, THE same men, who, years before, back in Canaan, in the grip of jealousy, had sold him into slavery for what they could get for him, to a caravan of merchants headed for Egypt.

It wasn’t quite fratricide, not quite as brutal as Cain and Abel, but it very nearly was, and it left a stain of guilt on their hearts that they had to cover with lies from then on, and had to live with day and night.

Oh, I know, there’s more to it. Not that Joseph was the innocent saint in the business, if you remember the story. He was no paragon of filial rectitude. In part, at least, in good part, he brought it on himself. A smart-aleck brat, that’s what he was, a smart-aleck, brash, too-big-for-his-britches kid. If we’re going to be honest, let’s be honest. The Bible is.

Along with Benjamin, his younger brother, he was his father’s obvious favorite, the apple of Jacob’s eye, and he was not only obnoxiously aware of it, he exploited it, with unabashed and unashamed manipulation--- the tenderest lamb chop at supper, the largest allowance at the end of the month, the shortest list of chores to do around the house, the most Nintendo games... they were all his, and he never missed a chance to rub it in.

Remember the story of the schoolboy who had to write a paper on Achilles, the mythological Greek hero? He wrote: “When Achilles was a baby, his mother held him by his heel and dipped him into the River Styx until he became intolerable.”

Well, that’s what Joseph was, too, at that stage of his development---so intolerable you couldn’t stand the stench. His brothers held their noses, bit their tongues, and bided their time. And when the old man gave him that coat---that famous “coat of many colors”--Andrew Lloyd Weber called it “an amazing technicolor dream coat”----

Archaeologists haven’t uncovered it yet.... someday maybe it’ll turn up---- I think it was probably purple with pink polka dots and had a ruby-studded mink collar...perfect attire for desert wear.... when Joseph started floosyin’ around in that uptown coat, they absolutely SPLIT A GUT. They kidnapped him, and would have killed him on the spot, if Reuben hadn’t convinced the others they could make a little money by keeping him alive and selling him.....

So, they dispatched him, and sent him on his way. Good riddance, they said....

See ya later, Jose......And they dipped that beautiful coat in chicken blood, I guess, or maybe Heinz ketchup.... and reported to the father through crocodile tears that a wild beast had eaten him.

AND THE YEARS WENT BY. Joseph matured during that interim, and I guess the brothers did too. They regretted their action. What they had done was unconscionable, even if it was provoked. JOSEPH EVEN CAME IN TIME DOWN IN EGYPT TO SEE THE HAND OF GOD IN THE TRAGEDY. “They meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” It takes some real maturity to get to that point.

He had to do some serious growing up for it to happen---- All that smart-aleck stuff had to be bruised... All that brash arrogance had to be smashed. A sentence in Pharaoh’s prison took the sheen off of his cockiness.

Fortunately, the best that was in him flowered, and the worst that was in him was purged. He came eventually to a maturity that realized you don’t make it in this world truly by stepping on other people’s backs---- EVEN IF YOU CAN DO IT, IT’S WRONG. You don’t become a real success by just looking out for ol’ Number ONE. That’s a pagan way to live. THERE’S A HIGHER AND NOBLER WAY.

A fundamental part of religion---the root meaning of which comes from 2 root words, which literally mean, “to tie together” .....“to bind fast” .....a basic, fundamental element of all true religion is the recognition that you have a responsibility for your brother..... not to exploit him, not to take advantage of him, not to use him, but to the best of your ability, consonant with protecting his freedom, to HELP him. Even if he’s wronged you, the temptation to get even is out of line.

Now, that’s a lot easier to say than to do. The rhetoric is much easier to espouse than to practice. Some people never do work through some old hurts. They carry them around wherever they go. The past is perpetuated and continues to cripple.

Here was Joseph facing his test. He knew what was right. Could he do it? What must have been running through his mind? What would have been running through your mind?

The roles were reversed now.... the shoe, as they say, was on the other foot. It was Joseph who had the upper hand, the hand on the grain sack. He has the power and they were the suppliants. He could have done anything he wanted. Wouldn’t the temptation for revenge have come easily?

How justified by any human standard he would have been if he had imperiously identified himself, ripped them over the coals, read them the riot act, and turned them away with empty baskets. Had they known who he was, it might have been the BEST they could have hoped for.

If I had been Joseph, it probably would have been the best they could have hoped for.

MISTREATMENT PRODUCES A LONG MEMORY.

But sometimes something bigger than vindictiveness can take hold of a heart. Thank God it can happen. Sometimes the natural, and selfish, and exclusive can be overcome.

Have I ever told you the story I heard in Central America of Tomas Borge? In a way, it’s a modern Joseph story. Tomas Borge, you probably remember, was one of the principal

leaders of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. In that government, before this recent election, when the Sandinistas lost power to the party headed by Mrs. Chamorro,

he served as Minister of the Interior. In the old days, prior to the overthrow of Somoza,

in 1979, Borge had been incarcerated in one of the Somoza’s jails as a dangerous revolutionary.

He was badly treated as a prisoner, abused, tortured....deliberately, systematically.... beaten, electrical shocks....

One especially cruel jailer supervised it, and enjoyed it. It’s not pleasant to talk about, or think about. They castrated him. I heard the story from a Baptist preacher I knew down there, a native Nicaraguan, who was not a Sandinista sympathizer, certainly not a communist.

He said that when the war was over, and Somoza’s forces were defeated, and the Sandinista regime was installed in power, they held a kind of tribunal to bring to justice those guilty for war crimes.

The man who had abused and tortured Tomas Borge was brought before the tribunal. Borge himself sat with the judges.... the charges were read, the documents checked, the witnesses questioned. The man admitted his guilt.

They turned to Borge. You’ve heard the evidence and the confession. What shall we do with him? He’s yours. And Tomas Borge looked down from the bench, at the man who had done such unspeakable things to him, and then said, “In the name of the revolution, you are forgiven.”

That’s big. The magnanimity of Joseph wasn’t expressed that rapidly, though the outcome of the story shows us that ultimately it was just as real and just as dramatic.

He squeezed all the drama he could from the situation first of course---I suppose that’s

human enough.

He made them jump through hoops, he made them sweat; he made them writhe a bit before playing his hand. AND HE MADE SURE THE CAST WAS COMPLETE BEFORE HE REVEALED HIS IDENTITY AND EFFECTED THE RECONCILIATION.

This was a family business, involving the whole family...everybody needed to be present for the estrangement to be ended, and the breach between the brothers to be healed.

Are you all present? (He knew already, of course....)  Is there anyone missing from

the delegation?

Well, they stammered, still not perceiving the real dynamics of what was happening, but knowing the time was past to be playing fast and loose with the truth.... Well, there are 12 of us in all....or there were. One is no more…. (Could there be a hint of guilt in the way it’s phrased?). 10 of us are here, and the other is back at home with our aging and ailing father.

SEND FOR HIM, Joseph commanded. Go get him. I’ll wait. I’ll hold one of you here as hostage. Before we talk business, you must all be on hand. The community must be complete. The group must be global. The circle must be unbroken. The family must be entire for us to go forward.

“You shall not see my face, unless your brother is with you.”

Now that’s as far as I could go in context. That’s where I had to stop. That was all I could legitimately massage from the story itself. WE CAN GUESS BEYOND THAT, OF COURSE. We can speculate about what else might have been going on in Joseph’s mind.... Was his motivation in sending them back for little Benjamin partly a reflection of his own home sickness, partly a search somehow for his own roots, maybe a normal desire to see again that little brother, who unlike the other boys, was his full brother, the only other son of his mother, Rachel? Maybe.

Was it partly a test to determine the sincerity and honesty of the other brothers? Maybe.

Is it somehow an early, primitive example of the later, more developed Hebrew concept of corporate solidarity, the important Biblical concept which forms the heart of the Old Testament understanding of the “people of God”, as well as the New Testament understanding of “Church”.....

Scholars are always looking for relationships like that. I DON’T KNOW. Maybe all of those things to some extent can be read into it.

What Joseph meant, however, or even what the original writer of the story had in mind when he spoke those words doesn’t exhaust their potential for us across the centuries. BLOW THIS TEXT UP. Lift it to a higher dimension. Respectfully place it on the lips of God and feel the strength and breadth of it coming through.

In context the fullness of it is muffled, yet even there, there is the hint, the foreshadowing of the imperative of this unity business. Is the family to be blessed? THEN LET IT BE THE WHOLE FAMILY. Are some to be fed? NOT UNLESS ALL ARE FED. In the divine economy what counts is not how much you HAVE, but How much you SHARE, and how much you CARE.

I tell you...if you don’t want to be serious about it, you’d better leave this text imbedded in the original setting, because pick it up and handle it, it’ll bite you.

What does it say to the typical, prosperous, affluent Protestant Church in the United States of America in the year 1990? What does it say to our congregation? “You shall not see my face, unless your brother is with you”.

I don’t think we have enough time, do we?

What does it say about the mandate of evangelism, for example? What does it say about

the responsibility and opportunity we have to put in a good word for our Church when the chance presents itself, to say to somebody, a brother or sister, “Hey, we like what’s happening there…

We like the people and the programs, and think you would, too. Come with us.”

What does it say about our priorities? It bothers me, frankly.... may I say it within the family....it bothers me as the minister of this great church that busy as we are, as productive as we are, as blessed as we are, that at this point in the calendar year, nearly 60% of the way through, we’ve paid only 30% of out apportionments. It’s all we’ve been able to pay. Our apportionments are for our brothers and sisters.

Our apportionments go to missions, to colleges, to camps, to build new churches, to purchase tractors and seed corn and Bibles.

They’re used to start a new Methodist University in Africa, the fastest growing Christian continent in the world. Apportionments help pay the salary of Bob Wannall, one of our own, who is serving a little church up in North Florida.

We haven’t failed to pay the light bill here yet. The air-conditioning for US is still working,

but the heat is on for some of the vital Christian causes we’re pledged to support. What if God were to say to us, “You shall not see my face, unless your brother is with you.”?

Church is not all reaching out to others, of course. Certainly, there is a place in the Faith for the “me” part of religion---a time for personal worship, for personal prayer, for personal growth, for personal enrichment. That’s where it all starts. Jesus never said GO to his disciples until he said COME. “Come unto Me....Come and see. Come and receive.” Of course that’s primary, and foundational.

But blessing implies sharing. The fruit of blessing is the willingness to share. There are brothers and sisters out there, and we’re all in this thing together.

I’m glad some of our people are going down once a month to work in the ministry of the Homeless. I think God approves of that. Wouldn’t you like to go along? There are brothers and sisters out there, and we’re all in this thing together.

I’m glad a few of our people have volunteered to help with the Ebenezer U.M.C. summer and after school day care program. Ebenezer is a black church down on Livingston St., I think it is, and with some District and Conference help---FROM APPORTIONMENTS--- they’re impacting the lives of some children in that neighborhood. Wouldn’t you like to help? There are brothers and sisters out there, and we’re all in this thing together.

I’m glad that on next Sunday morning here after the 2^nd worship service, about 12:30 some of us will be eating lunch with a delegation from the Grant Chapel UMC, a little black church over on the west side of town. We’re going to meet together and talk. I don’t know what will come out of it. There is no pre-set agenda, but at least we’ll be reaching out a hand of friendship and fellowship. Maybe you’d like to stick around and be a part of that. There are brothers and sisters out there, and we’re all in this thing together.

Well, I could go on almost interminably, but the time is gone. Preach the rest of the sermon to yourself. The possibilities for application are virtually limitless.

What do you do with your blessing? I guess that’s the question. Do you revel in it, or do you share it? Do you keep it for yourself, or do you extend it to your brother and sister?

From India, there comes an old fable which says that once a man walking through a forest saw a fox that had lost its legs and wondered how it lived.  Then he saw a tiger, come in with game in its mouth. The tiger had its fill and left the rest of the meat for the fox. The next day God fed the fox by means of the same tiger. The man began to wonder at God’s greatness and said to himself, “I, too, shall rest in a corner with full trust in the Lord and He will provide me with all I need.”

He did this for many days, but nothing happened, and he was almost at death’s door when he heard a voice say, “Oh you who are in the path of error, open your eyes to the truth. Follow the example of the tiger and stop imitating the disabled fox.”

Oh, friends, this is a Tiger Church. That’s our calling. Maybe more than ever in human history, it’s clear that we are ONE. There are brothers and sisters out there, and we’re all in this thing together. What happens to a part affects all. The blessed must bless or lose their blessing.

Besides, it’s the right thing to do, and in the final analysis, it’s the only way to live. Who should know that better than the Church of Jesus Christ. “You shall not see my face, unless your brother is with you.”