“The Ugly Middle”

Jacob settled in the land where his father had lived as an alien, the land of Canaan. This is the story of the family of Jacob.

Joseph, being seventeen years old, was shepherding the flock with his brothers; he was a helper to the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives; and Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father. Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he had made him a long robe with sleeves. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably to him.

            Now his brothers went to pasture their father’s flock near Shechem. And Israel said to Joseph, “Are not your brothers pasturing the flock at Shechem? Come, I will send you to them.” He answered, “Here I am.” So he said to him, “Go now, see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock; and bring word back to me.” So he sent him from the valley of Hebron.

He came to Shechem, and a man found him wandering in the fields; the man asked him, “What are you seeking?” “I am seeking my brothers,” he said; “tell me, please, where they are pasturing the flock.” The man said, “They have gone away, for I heard them say, ‘Let us go to Dothan.’ ” So Joseph went after his brothers, and found them at Dothan. They saw him from a distance, and before he came near to them, they conspired to kill him. They said to one another, “Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.” But when Reuben heard it, he delivered him out of their hands, saying, “Let us not take his life.” Reuben said to them, “Shed no blood; throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but lay no hand on him”—that he might rescue him out of their hand and restore him to his father. So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the long robe with sleeves that he wore; and they took him and threw him into a pit. The pit was empty; there was no water in it.

Then they sat down to eat; and looking up they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, with their camels carrying gum, balm, and resin, on their way to carry it down to Egypt. Then Judah said to his brothers, “What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not lay our hands on him, for he is our brother, our own flesh.” And his brothers agreed. When some Midianite traders passed by, they drew Joseph up, lifting him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. And they took Joseph to Egypt.

If you were worshipping with us last Sunday, you heard the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel—a divine wrestling match that would leave him forever changed—walking with a limp and new name, Israel. Jacob is the grandson of Abraham, who we first met in Genesis 11. Nearly the entire book of Genesis after the flood follows the story of this one family. With each generation, this family proves themselves to be so complicated and messy that it might just make you sigh with relief, “ah. Maybe my family isn’t the only one that’s messed up.” No, yours is definitely not the only one. Genesis 37 begins by setting the scene for the major family drama that’s yet to come. Candler School of Theology professor Roger Nam helpfully distills it to four main points:

1.    Jacob’s father was an immigrant (verse 1)
2.    Joseph is 17 years old (verse 2)
3.    Joseph shepherds with his brothers (verse 2)
4.    Joseph is a bit of a snitch (verse 2)
5.    Joseph is his father’s favorite child (verse 3) 

That last one is where things start to get ugly—favoritism. Jacob loves his son Joseph more than all the others the Bible says because Joseph was born when Jacob was an old man. Perhaps it was also because he was the firstborn son of Jacob’s favorite wife, Rachel. You’ll remember, Jacob was tricked into marrying her sister Leah before he could marry the woman he actually loved. But Joseph was not Jacob’s firstborn son. He was his tenth son, and Jacob’s favoritism would have been not only emotionally painful for his other sons, but it also would have been culturally disruptive. They lived at a time when the firstborn son was always supposed to receive the largest share of the inheritance and become the next patriarch. Favoring the tenth son was slight toward all his older brothers. Or perhaps Jacob, all these years after stealing his own brother Esau’s larger share of the inheritance, still resented the unfair system. As I said, this family has been complicated and messy for generations. They pass down their trauma and the seeds planted by favoritism, either in the form of a social norm or a father’s unapologetic preference, will soon bear ugly fruits.

            Have you felt the sting of favoritism in your family? Maybe it felt like unequal treatment—the younger sibling “always gets away with things” that mom and dad never let you do. Or grandparents who seem to spend more time with certain grandkids over others. Or the words heard by younger siblings around the globe, “why can’t you be more like your older sibling?” Parental favoritism can leave deep wounds. 

            But it’s not just that Joseph is his father’s favorite. Jacob is also a dreamer. Strangely, the lectionary skips over the telling of Joseph’s dreams, perhaps to make the reading at least a bit shorter, but suffice it to say, his dreams are not the kind to win over his already jealous and slighted older brothers. Verse 5 says “they hated him even more” for them. His dreams are of a radical reimagined future where his brothers would bow down to him. In his second dream, he sees the sun, the moon, and eleven stars bowing down to him—as if to signify his brothers, his mother, and his father bowing down. This is a bridge too far for even his father, who scolds him for such an idea. 

Dreamers are rarely popular. Especially dreamers who imagine a new kind of power structure. People with power, especially power that they received by nothing more than the circumstances of their birth, know that radical dreams have their own kind of power. The power of dreams is a threat to the way things have always been and so perhaps his brothers thought that by killing the dreamer, they could kill the dreams too. 

When his father sends Joseph out to the wilderness to find his brothers, he thinks he is sending him out to those closest to him—to his kin. Unfortunately, those closest to him will also be the ones who harm and betray him. Violence today often looks the same—the vast majority of abuse and violence comes from people the victims intimately know.

            As Joseph gets close, his brothers are so filled with jealousy that has festered into bitterness and hate that they conspire to kill him. They are ready with a plan, so we can guess that this is not the first time some of them have thought about it. It’s just the first time they’ve had an opportunity. Twice, they denigrate his dreams—“here comes the dreamer.” “We shall see what will become of his dreams.” Just when it seems that dreamer might actually die and with his dreams alongside him, Israel’s oldest son, Reuben, intervenes at the last moment. Instead of murdering their brother, they throw him into an empty cistern—a dark and lonely pit. The Bible doesn’t give us a glimpse of what Joseph was thinking or feeling. Did he know how much his own brothers hated him? Was he angry at God for giving him such big and powerful dreams? Did he regret opening his mouth and telling the truth? We don’t know. What we do know is that another brother, Judah, changes Joseph’s fate yet again by convincing his brothers to at least profit off of their betrayal. And so, our lectionary passage ends with Joseph sold into slavery for 20 pieces of silver and on his way to Egypt. 

            This chapter is bleak. When Josh and I tried to find a verse for the cover of the children’s bulletin, we couldn’t find a single one that softened the blow. It’s all bad. We are in the ugly middle of Joseph’s story. The lectionary leaves us with the great-grandson of Abraham betrayed and enslaved. It is as dark as the pit he is thrown into. Genesis 37 says nothing of God’s sovereignty or hope for Joseph’s future. Much later, Joseph will tell his brothers, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.” But he does not say that today. Today, we have no evidence that God will use any of this for good. Today, we have only the pit, only the horrific betrayal of Joseph’s own family, only his sale into bondage and slavery.

The lectionary passage ending today in the middle of the story reminds me that every middle was once the present. At one point, this wasn’t yet the middle of Joseph’s story. It was his present reality. There was no telling what would come next or how much of his story he had yet to live. He did not know there were 7 chapters left until he would make sense of all that had happened to him. He had only the present. His story had taken him only that far. 

It feels as if we are in the midst of an ugly middle. Today, we find ourselves in the ugly middle of a pandemic that seems to stretch on as far as we can imagine with a horrifying number of deaths each day. An incalculable loss, as the New York Times once put it. Like Joseph, we do not even know where we are in the story. While we hope this is not how our stories end, we cannot fast-forward our way out of the middle. Each day must be lived through, one by one. 

The pandemic isn’t the only thing causing ugly middles. You might be in the midst of your own, personal ugly middle right now. The slow and painful end to friendship or marriage. Life after a terrifying diagnosis. Depression that seems to never let up. 7th grade. The ugly middles of life are the parts we wish weren’t a part of our story. Couldn’t we just skip past this part? In the ugly middle, like Joseph, we find ourselves at the end of each day, unable to point to God’s sovereignty or signs of hope that God might use this all for good. There are those who are trying to rush to the happy ending. It would be tempting for today’s sermon to be about the happy ending that we know will come for Joseph. But we are not at the happy ending—we leave Joseph’s story far from a happy ending and go back into a world grappling with a crisis that is far from over. We are still in the ugly middle and we cannot rush to say that God has a plan for this when we see a thousand people dying per day. It never had to be this way. Rushing past the ugly middle ignores the people that will make it past it. 

I’ve always struggled to enjoy poetry because I never quite feel like I “get it.” But when I read Joseph’s story and I feel the temptation to rush toward meaning and hope instead of the ugly middle, I am reminded of my favorite poem by Clint Smith III which reads, 

When people say,
“we have made it
through worse before”

all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones
of those who did not make it, those who did not
survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who 

did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.
I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms
meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to 

convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no
solace in rearranging language to make a different word
tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe 

does not bend in a direction that will comfort us.
Sometimes it bends in ways we don’t expect & there are
people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader, 

do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future
to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not
live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies

that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left
standing after the war has ended. Some of us have
become ghosts by the time the dust has settled. 

 What seems to be an ugly middle can sometimes be an ugly ending. I do not what the future holds for any of us. If we look at Joseph’s story, just as far as we’ve read through it today, we cannot even say that things will get better. The text doesn’t give much hope. But it does give us the truth. The truth is that our stories have ugly middles and they cannot be skipped over, only lived. We live in a time when the truth is more valuable than ever because the truth can be hard to discern. It is weaponized and politicized until it becomes unrecognizable. Even the term “truther” now means conspiracy theorists. 

Are we in the “post-truth” era? I don’t think so. We are in an era, just like every other, in which hard truths are not popular. But today, the Bible does not fail us. It gives us the truth, even when we don’t quite like it. You see, the Bible isn’t just true on good days. It is true on the bad ones too. The word of the Lord points to betrayal and violence and says, “do not look away because you are uncomfortable. These are my beloved children and their stories are the stories of my grief.” Although we would much prefer to instead read the happy ending, we are given the gift of knowing that God sees our ugly middles. Even Joseph, who would someday save his family from starvation and secure a future for God’s chosen people, had an ugly middle. 

If today feels like your ugly middle, then know that it is okay to feel what you are feeling. It is okay to be sad. It is okay to be angry. It is okay to feel as though you do not have the energy to make it to the next chapter in your story. It is okay to want to scream “THIS IS NOT HOW IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE.” I imagine Joseph at the bottom of the cistern, or in chains en route to Egypt, crying out those words. If today is your ugly middle, know that you are seen and loved by God. Your story is not invisible.

If today is not your ugly middle, if you feel as though you are on solid ground, far from the pit, then let me say hallelujah. We may be in the same storm right now, but we are not in the same boat. I don’t wish ugly middles on anyone. If you aren’t, you probably know someone who is in the midst of an ugly middle and it can be hard to know what to do or say. Seeing someone’s pain up close isn’t comfortable or easy. So, let me give you a word of advice—show up. Genesis 37 makes no mention of God, but the next story about Joseph does—the Lord was with Joseph (Gen 39:2). We know that God is and has always been Emmanuel—God with us. You don’t have to be God to practice showing up. Show up with a face mask and a well-sanitized homecooked meal. Show up with a phone call, ready to ask questions that will elicit uncomfortable answers. Show up by saying, “I do not know what comes next, but I will be here for you as long as you need me.” 

And as for what not to say? I can’t recommend enough Duke Divinity Professor, Kate Bowler’s bestselling memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved. Kate was a young mother and tenured professor when all of a sudden life threw her into an ugly middle—stage four colon cancer at 35. Kate quickly learned that “easy” answers are never enough in the face of real pain.

Friends, when we turn to God’s word, we may not always get what we want. Today, we didn’t receive a happy ending. But we did receive the truth. Even in the pages of one of scripture’s most heartbreaking betrayals, we know that God is not absent. And as for hope? I think, perhaps, we can find hope too. For hope is not certainty. We do not hope Joseph will have a happy ending to his story—we know. All we need to do is flip to the end of the book. But our lives have no such certainty. Our lives require the gritty kind of hope that says, “even in the face of darkness, I have hope that brighter days lie ahead.” Wherever you find yourself today, may you know that God is with you, and may you hold on to hope that the ugly middle is not the ending.