How Did We Get to This?

And they said to each other, “Here comes that dream-master! And so now, let us kill him and fling him into one of the pits and we can say, a vicious beast has devoured him, and we shall see what will come of his dreams” [Genesis 37: 19-20, The Hebrew Bible, tr. by Robert Alter].

The wife looked at her husband, whose serial infidelity had surfaced once again. Too weary to continue the struggle—she’d fought for their union on several prior, similar occasions—she looked at him through the tears in her eyes and asked, “How did we get to this?”

The man thought it odd that a police car had just pulled into his driveway. This was a quiet, upscale neighborhood. No worries about crime here. The man stepped out onto the front porch and greeted the officer, whose sad duty was to tell the gentleman that his son—married, and in his early 30s—had been found dead of Fentanyl poisoning. Sobbing, the father looked up into the sky and silently cried, “How did we get to this?”

It’s a question that is all-too-often thought or uttered as one or more members of a family struggle with betrayal, estrangement, senseless loss, or abject loneliness. It’s a question that is as old as humanity itself. “How did we get to this?” Usually, the journey to this is along a pathway with many steps.

As we turn to the Old Testament lesson appointed for this upcoming Sunday, Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28 [the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, RCL, Year A], the question is at the heart of the story. “How did Joseph’s brothers get to this point? Why do they want to kill him? Their sentiment had been brewing for some time.

Chapter 37 marks the beginnings of the extended Joseph story. Yet even before this particular story of difficult family dynamics, there has been plenty of pain, deception, and intrigue amid the house of Jacob [a/k/a “Israel”, see Gen. 35:10]. Jacob is favored by God, but Jacob is complex. He has lived by trickery.

Jacob used it to gain Esau’s birthright and to gain the favored blessing of Isaac, his father. Then, in the “Leah/Rachel Chronicles,” Jacob is tricked into marrying Leah. Only later, does he get his prize, Rachel. Alas, Leah bears Jacob six sons, including Reuben, the firstborn, while Rachel cannot get pregnant.

Following in the footsteps of her husband’s grandmother, Sarah, who offered her maidservant, Hagar, to Abraham, Rachel offers her own maidservant, Bilhah, to Jacob. Bilhah becomes Jacob’s favorite concubine, giving birth to Dan and Naphtali, Jacob’s fifth and six sons.

It gets worse, of course. One evening, while Jacob was away, “Reuben went and lay with Bilhah” [Gen. 35:22]. Jacob found out and was suitably angry. And, of course, we haven’t even gotten to young Joseph.

Joseph, the first of two sons that Rachel was finally able to give Jacob, is a “Daddy’s boy” (not a little ironic considering that Jacob was a “Mama’s boy”). Jacob gives Joseph the “technicolor” coat and, because Joseph is a spoiled tattletale, uses his young son to spy on the older brothers. What harm could come from that?

In addition to being a tattletale, Joseph is a dreamer. When his dreams suggest a future in which his brothers (and his father) will bow down to him, he quickly tells them all about it. Why not? What harm could come from that?

And so, his brothers desire to kill the dream and in order to do that, they decide to kill the dreamer, or maybe, as Reuben suggests [Gen. 37:22], abandon him to a pit. Reuben apparently is thinking, “How did we get to this?”

Judah has a better idea. The brothers can sell Joseph to the caravan that’s approaching. Here, I think, Yahweh shows His sense of humor because this isn’t just any caravan. It’s a bunch of Ishmaelites (literally the brothers’ half-cousins). Jacob’s older sons get 20 pieces of silver. Joseph gets packed away to Egypt. The dreamer no doubt thinks to himself, “How did we get to this?” [see Gen. 37:34].

If we didn’t know how the long story ends, we’d likely say that it is at this point that things look bleakest. It will take us many more verses to discover that God is at work in the shadows. If, however, we turn to the Psalter reading appointed for this week [Psalm 105:1-6, 16-22, 45b]], we get a quicker foretaste of God’s mysterious, wonderful ways.

And He called forth famine over the land, every staff of bread He broke.
He sent a man before them—as a slave was Joseph sold [Ps. 105-16, The Hebrew Bible, tr. by R. Alton].

The psalmist sings praises to the God who sends one son ahead to suffer in order that all the sons and daughters in bondage might be redeemed. Indeed, while Joseph will have to endure pain and imprisonment, his God-given ability to interpret dreams and to manage Egypt’s economy will lead not only to the survival of Egypt, but to the survival of his brothers who sold him away, and to the survival of Jacob/Israel. Yet God has more than survival in mind.

Yesterday, I saw a news report about a homeless encampment in Oakland that is euphemistically referred to as Fentanyl Island. Perhaps you saw it too. The area looked not like part of an American city, but rather a part of war torn Kiev. Burned out vehicles lined the street. Bewildered and semiconscious souls were visible as well. I thought, “How did we get to this?”

Aging, career politicians on both sides of the aisle step to the podium and can’t convey a cogent thought. Elected officials, again from both parties, serve a few terms and amass fortunes far beyond what their governmental salaries would suggest might be possible. “How did we get to this?”

68 percent of Americans say they seldom, if ever, attend church, synagogue, or mosque. United Methodists don’t want to be “united” any longer. Presbyterians gave up on unity decades ago. Many Episcopalians and Moravians have just given up altogether. A Presbyterian minister, employed at a nearby college, and who is reported to have ended two of her own, delivered a sermon a couple of years ago entitled, “Blessed are those who end pregnancies.”

“How did we get to this?”

Well, just as the Jacob-Joseph story shows, we didn’t “get to this” overnight. It has been a slow, but steady slide. Many my age nostalgically look back to the time when we were children, to an age when well-attended churches were common. Alas, many in the pews back then were there for the wrong reasons. A bad lunch on Wednesdays at Rotary, enduring an hour of church on Sundays—it’s what successful folks did. No, to my mind, the way “we got to this” is that long ago, long before the 1950s, we became uncomfortable with the Truth.

You may recall that when Pilate questioned Jesus on the night Jesus was betrayed, our Lord responded that the reason He was born and came into the world was to testify to the truth [John 18:37]. Pilate then asked the Savior, “What is Truth?”

You see, to Pilate, like current online social platforms, truth is malleable. Truth is what the powerful said it is. If asked what truth was, Pilate, like the line in the old lawyer’s joke, would have responded, “What do you want it to be?”

Of course, Jesus had already given the answer to His disciples when He said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” [John 14:6]. And like our brother, Pilate, humanity is altogether uncomfortable with discussions of Truth. We’re more concerned with living in a world that assumes that there is a plurality of truths. If we don’t like a passage of scripture, we’ll just change it.

At the church I was attending some years ago, we were having our umpteenth discussion of climate change. Several lamented the deep divisions within our society on the subject. At the conclusion of our time together, one in the group said, “I suppose I’m frustrated because the other side just doesn’t seem to understand that the fundamental issue is our survival.”

At that moment, I likely agreed. Much later, however, I remembered an earlier discussion I’d had with our friend, Will Willimon, on a somewhat similar issue. In that discussion Will allowed that for the Christian, “survival cannot be the issue.” According to Will,

We live a story of martyrs, and of accounts of Gethsemane and Golgotha. Those who collaborated with the Romans to put Jesus to death did so, according to the story, out of a concern for national survival. Christian heroes are those for whom survival was definitely not the issue [from my journal notes, after the fact].

Again, from my Willimon notes, “Christianity isn’t just another philosophy or some primitive system of belief; it is a community of people who worship the Jew whom Pilate sent to the cross.”

It is a community that is concerned with Truth—a Truth that cannot be manufactured. And how did we get to this? Well, Psalm 105 reminds us that in the time of Jacob and Joseph, God “sent a man before them—as a slave was Joseph sold.” It is God’s nature to send someone ahead to endure suffering so that the rest of us can be redeemed. We are redeemed; we don’t just survive. In Truth, that’s what God did in Jesus.

How did we get to this? Through Jesus, that’s how.