Redemption for Messy Families
I’m going to begin with a revelation. I’m going to tell you something that I have learned in the last 13 or so years of life, a nugget of wisdom that I hope will stay with you, so listen carefully. Here it is: having children changes your life. I know, super profound. You can send me an email of thanks later. It may not be that profound actually, but I still find myself saying some variation of that repeatedly in many different situations. At 6 in the morning when you find yourself serving as the jungle gym for a 3 year old and you’re doing your best to ignore it and trying to squeeze a few more minutes of sleep in while another human being sits on your chest, you think to yourself, “Having kids has changed my life.” When you realize that you can sing every single Disney song by heart, and then a few years later every single Taylor Swift song by heart, you think to yourself, “Having kids has really changed my life.” Or when you find that more than one day of your life is spent preoccupied with the latest drama coming out of the 6th grade hallways at the elementary school makes you think to yourself, “Having kids has really changed my life.” Maybe it’s not profound, but it is at least surprising sometimes…and being that it was Father’s Day this past Sunday I thought I’d at least bond with you parents out there about the ongoing revelation that being a parent is. Just when you think you’ve got a grip on it, it changes on you, and as Kate and I stare down the barrel that is Junior High School I guess I just needed some camaraderie today. We’re not alone in this thing!
Obviously, all of these surprises are overshadowed by the surprise of how deeply you can love another human being, that the moment they enter into the world you know you will do anything to protect them and help them live the richest life possible. My girls have changed my life in the most fundamental way…they have given me a whole new dimension of being and identity. I am their Dad, and I always will be. I write that with the greatest sense of gratitude and, at the same time, fear and trembling. There really is no greater responsibility than to care for and help shape and foster another human being. Paul’s warning in Ephesians 6:4 is sobering and warranted. “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”
But we all come from some sort of family, and we know it can be a messy business. I am sure we all probably have some interesting family stories to tell. Our families are usually some of the people who know us best in the world. They are the people that have seen us grow up and experience life in all of its ups and downs. It is a privilege really, even though it sometimes feels more like a pain in the “bumbum” as my daughters used to say not so long ago. Families are wonderful, and at the same time they are often the places where we experience our individual brokenness more than any of our other relationships. And conversely, they are often the places where we experience the brokenness of others too, a Petri dish for the dilemma of the human condition.
Just think about it. When you’re at work you try to be on pretty good behavior usually. You’re respectful, you’re productive, at least you try to be. You try to smooth out some of your rough edges because you are engaging with other people who you want to like you. You want them to be impressed with you so that you can be successful and continue to grow in your job. Or think about dating. Is there a better example of us trying to put our best foot forward, to impress, to be the best version of ourselves that we can muster with proper grooming and tasteful clothing. We want to be seen as funny, smart, and attractive. At least that’s the person that most of us describe as “our type.” No one ever says I’m looking for someone who is anti-social, leaves their clothes in a pile in front of the dresser for days on end, never loads the dishwasher, and is a grouch in the morning. Or I’m looking for someone who is jealous, snores, and farts in the bed. And that’s marriage in a nutshell. Just kidding. Marriage is really full of glamour and intrigue. Just ask any of us married folk;) There are so many relationships in our lives in which we present an edited version of ourselves, BUT our families usually have the distinct honor of getting to experience the unedited us. They get to see us in all of our glory when we have stopped trying to impress and are just living our day to day.
Do you think she knows that he farts in the bed and picks his nose?
I wanted to take a look at how God chose to bring about his redemptive purposes for the entire world. He did it through a family. Abraham and Sarah’s family to be exact, and I want to focus in on Abraham and Sarah’s grandson, Jacob, and his kids primarily…in the chapter of Genesis 37. We read the beginning of the story of Joseph and his eleven brothers, and we see a picture of a family at odds, divided and broken to the point of betrayal and even thoughts of murder. What is this doing in the Bible, let alone in the very family of Jacob?...one of the most important people in Judeo/Christian history, a guy who was given the promise by God to be the father of many nations, who God renamed Israel. Jacob’s offspring would become God’s people. His 12 sons and their families become the 12 tribes of Israel. Shouldn’t Jacob’s family then be a model for all of our families? Shouldn’t they show us a picture of familial love and harmony? Wouldn’t God want to choose people who are doing it right? That’s what so many of us have believed about the Bible, that it’s full of heroes and good examples for us to follow. Well, that is not what we see here.
Right off the bat we see Jacob guilty of one of the big no no’s in parenting. Dad’s, Jacob is an object lesson of what not to do as a father. He plays favorites with his kids. We’re told that he loved Joseph more than any of his other children, and he didn’t keep it a secret. I mean it would be understandable to read about a parent that secretly loved one his or her kids more than the others, but they did their best to treat them all the same. Shouldn’t that be the right lesson that the Bible should teach us. Sometimes it happens, you connect with some people better than others at times. But that is not what we see here. Jacob loves Joseph more and shows it by giving him this very impressive colorful robe, his amazing Technicolor dream coat for you Andrew Lloyd Weber fans out there. Jacob effectively rubs it in the face of his 11 other sons. “I like this one the best.”
And as you might suspect it does what this kind of favoritism often does, it produces a brat in Joseph and division in the family. Early on in this story Joseph, who would also be used powerfully by God for his redemptive purposes, is a bit of a little jerk. He just kind of sucks. He’s the type of guy that you would never want to hang out with. He starts out by ratting on his brothers after taking care of the flock with them. He gives their father a bad report about them. He’s just a stereotypical spoiled little brother playing the tattle-tale. Then, he has a couple of dreams that were obviously prophetic in nature showing him to be in an elevated position above all of his family and instead of keeping it to himself he goes straight to his brothers and tells them about it. He even upsets his parents with one of his dreams because it implied that even Jacob and Rachel would bow to Joseph. This is a picture of a guy who either has no social skills at all and is completely naïve about how he comes off to people, or it is a seventeen year-old guy who thinks he’s God’s greatest gift to the world after being told so by his dad for his whole life and has the flashy jacket to show it. I think the latter is more likely.
When you think about it, it makes sense that Jacob would like Joseph the best because he is most like him. Jacob was jerky as well to his older brother too, if you know the story of Jacob and Esau, tricking Esau out of his birthright, and lying to his father to get his brother’s blessing. Joseph is a chip off the old block. Following in his dad’s footsteps by sticking it to his older brothers. Things get hairy when Jacob decides to send Joseph off to find his brothers herding their flock of sheep in order to “see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock, and bring me word.” It sounds harmless, but in light of what Joseph did in the beginning of the story, it is clear that Jacob is sending him out to go and evaluate his brothers and then come back and rat on them again if they’re screwing around or not doing their jobs. Jacob is parent of the year here. I mean every parenting decision the guy makes is a textbook of what not to do if you want your kids to get along, if you want to avoid creating division amongst your family.
SO how do Joseph’s brothers respond? They plot to kill him. Maybe a little more extreme than most of us have experienced in our families, but that’s what they wanted to do. While they were plotting they repeatedly reference his dreams referring to him as the “dreamer” and then saying, “we’ll see what will become of his dreams.” They were filled with bitterness and resentment, and despised the idea of Joseph ruling over them. Thankfully, for Joseph’s sake, the oldest brother Reuben convinces the others just to throw him into a pit in the desert instead of killing him. SO they strip him of the offensive Technicolor dream coat and throw him into the pit. Then it says they sat down to eat. It just shows how callous they had become, how full of bitterness and spite they were. Imagine the yelling and screaming Joseph must have been doing from the pit, and his brothers just sit down to eat ignoring him.
Then seeing a caravan of traders coming by another of the brothers suggests that they sell Joseph to them so that they can be rid of him without having to kill him, he was their own brother after all. It was a much more reasonable thing to sell their brother into slavery, so that’s what they did.
This is a dysfunctional family to be sure, and yet it is this very family that God will use to bring about his plans of redemption for the whole world. This account is here to point us to God, not to us…to his sovereignty and grace, not to our ability to do what is right. It points us to the fact that God is in control, and that he will accomplish his purpose of salvation for his people. He will be faithful to his promises and nothing will be able to thwart them.
The great irony of the account is the fact that everything the brothers do to prevent Joseph’s dreams coming true actually end up leading to the fulfillment of the dreams. They sell him in to slavery and he is taken to Egypt and purchased by one of Pharoah’s officers, which ultimately leads to Joseph ruling in Egypt in the following chapters and being the source of salvation for his parents, his brothers, and all their family members. The Israelites would live and flourish in Egypt for centuries until God would send another deliverer to them in Moses to bring them out of Egypt. God uses what Joseph’s brothers intended for evil for redemption. They betrayed him and sold him for silver. Sounds very familiar. There was another time in the Bible when Someone was betrayed and sold for silver and God used that one for good too. This story is telling us that God has His way. It is not despite the brother’s best efforts, it is actually through them.
There’s more. The brother that suggests they sell him instead of leaving him there to die was Judah. It would be out of the line of Judah that David would come and ultimately Jesus, the Savior of the world. Moses, who was the author of Genesis, wants to display the amazing wisdom and power of God by showing us a very unedited account of Jacob’s family. He wants to show that there is nothing that God won’t use to bring about redemption for the world. He shows us that God has chosen to work through mundane broken people to accomplish the incomparable healing salvation of the world.
This is the same God that is at work in your life. He hasn’t changed. He continues to use the mundane and broken to bring about unspeakable liberation and healing. He works through our pain and dysfunction because that is what he has to work with because. . .here’s another revelation for you, ready? No one has it together. The Bible is not about giving you an example to follow, about presenting you with a bunch of moral higher ups who always make the right choice and teach us how to live. No, the Bible is full of families just like ours, full of people just like us who more often than not find themselves in over their heads, who get themselves into trouble repeatedly and need to be saved. The Bible is about giving us the good news that there is a God whose primary concern is to save, to heal, to forgive, to redeem people like us. It tells us that He works through the things in our lives that we think are beyond saving, beyond repair, and he uses them to show us just how powerful he is. There is nothing beyond his grasp, nothing he can’t and won’t redeem.
The funny thing about this is that we still spend so much of our time trying to hide our struggles and our weakness. Even though every single person is in the same boat and dealing with some kind of brokenness right now in their lives, some kind of major unsolved problem, we reflexively try to hide it from each other. We try to present ourselves in a different light, like we said earlier about how we are in the work place or when we go on a date versus the way we are when we are with our families and our guard is down. But even then, and maybe even especially then when we’re adults, depending on the situation, when we are amongst family we often find that we are trying hard to make everyone believe that we are some place we are not, that we have it together in ways that, if we were honest, we actually don’t. Maybe we’re still competing with siblings, or maybe we’re still desperately trying to get the approval of our now aging parents. We put up the facades because we are still scared that there is no hope for our broken places, for our weakness. We don’t want to risk showing the world the unedited version of ourselves because we are afraid that we will be rejected. We will be the outcast. We will be judged and sent packing. It’s not too dissimilar from the worries of the 6th grade hallway in point of fact.
Sadly, often times the church is the worst place for this. Talk about irony! The group that says we believe that this book is the Word of God, this book full of examples of messed up people dealing with messed up situations being loved and saved by a merciful and gracious God, we are often the worst at being open and vulnerable about our weakness and pain. Sometimes, church is the last place you want to reveal the unedited you because so many of us have experienced the same thing when either we or someone we know or love has taken that risk of showing some of their true selves, judgment. Dismissal. Rejection. Instead of being a place where sinners gather to experience God’s radical and unconditional grace it has often been a place where we try our hardest to appear like we are holding it together, that we are righteous and getting better all the time. That is just exhausting.
But when the actual Bible is preached, and we see that it is full of account after account about grace, about forgiveness from a God who never tires of saving hurting and weak people, people that are in over their heads, people whose best thinking often makes matters worse…then there’s hope for someone like me. If God can work through a messed-up group like Jacob’s family where they literally wanted to kill each other, and if he can redeem that situation and bring something good and ultimately great for the world out of it, then maybe he can do something with me and my life. Maybe I don’t have to keep hiding all of the time. Maybe I can begin to let my guard down a bit and risk a little more light. Maybe I can start to be the unedited Sean a little more, which is the real me after all. Because the truth is that I stand on grace, we all stand on grace. It is the only thing that we have at the end of the day. Just like Jacob and all of his sons, it is the only thing we can bank on. We have a God who loves us, who saves us, who forgives us, and sets us free from the prison of keeping up appearances. I want to be in that place. I want to be where people are weak in front of each other. I want to be where people stand with each other as they go through the ups and downs of life. I want to be where you get a hug when you share your pain and about how you messed up again. I want to be where they remind you that forgiveness is real and it’s given to you right now without conditions because of Jesus Christ. That place sounds wonderful; that is a place of freedom.
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