Knowing where the stones are
Commentary
The walking on water jokes abound. Typically they involve three people out in a boat, one of them invited by the other two who normally have nothing good to say about her. Yet when one laments that he forgot his lunch, she offers to go back to the shore to get it. As she disembarks the row boat, she steps onto the water and walks across the lake toward the car. The one disgusted man says to the other, "Look at that! She can't even swim."
Another version tells that when she started walking across the lake, one of the men tried to follow her. But with his first step onto the water, he went under. Emerging with gasps for air, the almost-drowned man asks, "What happened?" His friend says, "She knows where the stones are."
The story about Jesus in our Gospel certainly tickles the funny bone. But perhaps the story, like that of Elijah, has more to do with the God who controls nature and chaos than with the mystery of how to take a walk on the lake without getting wet.
1 Kings 19:9-18
Elijah was active as a prophet in the northern kingdom of Israel during the second quarter of the ninth century B.C. The dynasty of Omri was in power in the person of Ahab who was married to Jezebel, a Phoenician and the daughter of the king of Tyre. Jezebel's presence in the royal city of Samaria brought to a head the failure of the people of Israel to distinguish between Yahweh and Baal. Having defended the honor of Yahweh over Baal on Mount Carmel, Elijah had his followers slay Baal's prophets. Antagonized by his act, Jezebel set out to kill Elijah, forcing him to flee into the wilderness where he was so nourished by an angel that he was able to journey forty days and nights to Mount Horeb.
While the English translations do not normally notice, the first verse speaks of Elijah's arrival at "the cave." A specific cave that comes to mind when anyone tells about Mount Horeb is the "cleft in the rock" from which Moses once saw God's back (Exodus 33:17-23). This connection is substantiated in verse 11 with the words "and the Lord passed by," recalling Exodus 33:22 where the Lord's "glory passes by."
Having thus established himself at the spot where Moses once saw God, Elijah must have been full of anticipation of the same treat. Yet the Lord welcomed him to the spot with the question, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" Elijah explained his presence there by reciting the trouble brewing back home and explaining to God the fortune that in the midst of all those rebels, he alone -- Elijah -- is left and so he has taken refuge there.
The Lord responded to his harangue by offering an audio-visual demonstration. Taking the prophet out of the cave to stand on the mountain, the Lord showed him a powerful wind, an earthquake, and a fire -- all symbols of the presence of Baal, the Canaanite fertility god, and all used elsewhere in the Old Testament to demonstrate the Lord's presence (Exodus 19:16-18; 20:18; Isaiah 31:9). We call such natural demonstrations of the Lord's presence a theophany, literally, a god appearance. Here, however, the Lord was "not" in any of the phenomena of nature. What we have here is a lot of "phany" but no "theos."
Then comes "the sound of silence crushed." Imagine such a phrase so many centuries prior to Simon and Garfunkel!
The Lord again provided the same sound and light show as earlier and again asked the same question: "What are you doing here, Elijah?" And the prophet responded the same as before, obviously not getting the point of the demonstration.
Finally the Lord resorted to words. Or should we say "the word"? That word was the commissioning of the prophet to get off the mountain and go back into the fray, into historical involvement where the action is. Anoint kings! Anoint a prophetic successor! And by the way, remember that you are not the only one; there are seven thousand more in Israel.
The passage has special meaning for me. I told it to a group of children living in a squatters' village beside the dump of the city Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. My purpose was to help the children understand that God is not isolated in sacred places but involved in their very lives, present among them. That is one way to preach on the passage.
Another way is to recognize that though we fret over doing the Lord's work in a secular and violent society, God announces that the present and the future are in his hands. The chaos of life is the arena into which God sends us to make a difference.
Romans 10:5-15
Having struggled in the previous chapter with his pain over the disbelief of Israel, Paul moves on to announce how people of every nationality might be saved and how they can do what is necessary.
Paul begins his section here with the contrast between the righteousness that comes from obedience to the law (Moses) and the righteousness that comes from faith through the word. That latter righteousness is the one by which people are saved.
Of what does it consist? The verbal confession that "Jesus is Lord" and the accompanying belief that God raised him from the dead. The two are one and the same. According to the first words of this epistle Jesus Christ is declared to be Son of God and Lord because of his resurrection from the dead. Confessing Jesus as Lord means nothing less than believing that God raised him from the dead. This confession is the righteousness that comes from faith.
To demonstrate that salvation comes through this confession, Paul cites two passages from the Old Testament, both of which announce the same news, one in negative form, the other positively. First, Paul quotes Isaiah 28:16: "No one who believes in him will be put to shame." In the context of the prophecy of Isaiah this promise of salvation is offered to believers as salvation from the coming judgment. Second, he cites Joel 2:32: "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved." The verse is the culmination of that powerful prophecy in which Joel announces the outpouring of the Lord's Spirit on men and women, on old and young, on all levels of society (Joel 2:28-32) -- the passage that serves as Peter's explanation of the gift of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2). Truly the passage supports Paul's claim that "the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him" (v. 12; italics mine).
All that answers the first question about how can people be saved. Now we come to the means by which people can arrive at that point of confession.
Calling on the Lord means believing in him. Believing in him is dependent on hearing the word. Hearing the word requires someone to announce the word. And such messengers would never speak unless they are sent.
Reversing the sentences provides the proper sequence: God sends messengers, the messengers announce the word, the word is heard, the message heard is believed, the believers call on God, and so God saves them. The advantage of reversing Paul's order is that the whole sequence is thus more clearly seen as the work of God. Indeed the entire act of salvation begins with God's mission, that is, God's sending of people into the world so that others might be blessed. That divine mission began with the Lord's sending of Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 12:1-3 and continues with the church of every day right into our own.
The sequence also challenges the church of very day to recognize that receiving the word that saves is not the end. It is really the means to the end, that all might call on the name of the Lord and so be saved. As God sent Elijah down from his desired haven into the messy affairs of the world, so God sends all the mission people of God as messengers, even prophets, to a hearing-impaired world.
Matthew 14:22-33
After miraculously feeding the 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish, Jesus "made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds." The connection between the feeding miracle and that of walking on the sea is difficult to ascertain, as is the reason Jesus found it necessary to get the disciples out of the way. The same sequence of events occurs in all four gospels, but only John gives an explanation about the connection: the wish of the zealots for a leader who could stir up the crowds against Rome, and so they wanted to make Jesus their king. The feeding miracle would have provided the inspiration they were looking for, and perhaps Jesus wanted the disciples out of the way so they themselves would not get caught up in the political fervor.
Now what happens in our pericope drives home the point. Having dismissed the crowds, Jesus went up on the mountain (like Elijah) to pray and stayed until evening. By this time the boatload of disciples was caught in a vicious storm on the sea. Jesus now descended the mountain and came to them, "walking on the sea" (v. 25). The same Greek words appear in the Greek Old Testament at Job 9:8 where in a description of God's role in creation, the Lord "trampled on the waves of the Sea (monster)." The words in Job reflect the ancient myth that the chaos of the sea dragon must be controlled before God's orderly reign over creation can ensue (see Isaiah 27:1).
Applied to Jesus these same words announce once more who he is: the Son of God to whom authority over the Sea is transferred. They also announce that the enemy is the universal chaos that would destroy the peaceful and promised kingdom of God. Yet the good news is that in Jesus Christ, as Son of God, the kingdom of God dawns with his subjugation of chaos. In that sense the story is not different in its message from the calming of the sea in 8:23-27.
That sense of universal mission over the eschatological enemy might be the reason that Jesus refuses to get caught up in the local skirmishes of the day. The attempt of the zealots to make Jesus their king and lead them against Rome (admittedly John's interpretation) might be the reason Jesus shooed the disciples away before doing the same with the crowds. His battle was against a much bigger foe than a mere Roman Empire.
The walking on the sea caper culminates in Jesus' invitation to Peter to join him. Without thinking, that is, with blind faith, Peter stepped out of the boat and walked toward Jesus. Only when his fear of a strong wind overcame him did the apostle sink. His cry for help led Jesus to rescue him, but not without the master's reprimand for his lack of faith when the wind increased.
Now back safely in the boat, those who had witnessed the entire event worshiped Jesus, confessing, "Truly you are the Son of God." What led the disciples to that understanding was not simply the magical act. It was the realization on the basis of their Scripture that Jesus had performed an act reserved exclusively for the Lord God (Job 9:8). It was an act expressing power and even victory over the universal chaos of the Sea.
How paradoxical that the next time such a confession was uttered would be at the moment of public vulnerability, the moment of God's weakness on the cross of his Son (27:54). Faith in who Jesus is always seems to be caught up in this tension between weakness and strength, between winning and losing, between the devil and the surface of the blue sea.
God not only sent Elijah down from the mountain to become engrossed in the chaotic affairs of human history. God also sent his own Son down from the mountain in order to take on chaos itself and to invite his disciples to join him on the wave of victory.
In faith we take that step even without knowing where the stones are.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By Elizabeth Achtemeier
Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28
Here begins the collection of Joseph stories with which the rest of Genesis will be concerned. There are some contradictions within our text because we have the two sources of the Yahwist and the Elohist woven together. In verses 21-22, it is the northern forbear Reuben, born of Leah, who would save Joseph's life. In verses 26-27, it is Judah from the South. In verse 27, Joseph is to be sold to some passing Ishmaelites, but in verse 28, Midianite traders are the ones passing by. The interweaving of the two sources now serves to involve both northern and southern forbears in the rescue of Joseph from death, as well as to highlight the indecisiveness of the brothers about what to do with their young sibling.
But let's face it. Joseph is a brat, the spoiled youngest son of Jacob's old age, who is his father's favorite and a brash braggart at that. He rashly tells his brothers and parents about his dreams of superiority over them (vv. 5-11). And he lazes about in his long-sleeved coat, while his brothers have to work to tend the flocks. (The correct text says that the coat is not many-colored, but rather it has long sleeves which are for dress and not for work.) It is little wonder that Joseph's eleven brothers hate him and just want to be rid of him. Some of the brothers despise Joseph so much that they want to kill him, but the cooler heads of Reuben and Judah forestall that vengeance. So they settle for selling Joseph as a slave to the Midianite or Ishmaelite traders who are on their way to Egypt. In Egypt, the traders then sell the young lad to Potiphar, the captain of Pharaoh's guard (39:1).
Joseph is obviously an obedient son of his adoring father. When Jacob bids Joseph seek out his shepherding brothers to inquire after their welfare, Joseph immediately obeys (37:13). But he gets lost on the way. When he cannot find his brothers at Shechem, he wanders around in the hill country until a stranger tells him that the brothers have moved their flocks to Dothan, some miles north of Shechem in the region of Samaria. There the brothers are located, but Joseph has made a long trek from Hebron in the south to Dothan in the north.
The brothers, however, have no thought of offering Joseph food and drink and rest from his long journey. Instead, some of them immediately plot Joseph's death, and the words that they speak become a prophecy of everything that follows. "Here comes this dreamer," the brothers say. "Come now, let us kill him ... and we shall see what shall become of his dreams" (vv. 19-20).
Those prophetic words are quoted on a plaque on the motel in Memphis where Martin Luther King, Jr., was staying when he was killed. There could not be a more apt use of this quotation from the Joseph story, for the saying concerns the dreams of a dreamer -- Joseph in our text, and Martin Luther King in our time. "We shall see what shall become of his dreams."
What the brothers of Joseph did not realize and what our society has not always realized is that the dreams of Joseph and of King were not made up by the human dreamers. No. The dreams came from God. They were the sign and the foretaste of the plan that God was working out in the Genesis story and that he is working out in our world.
God had to send Joseph ahead into Egypt in order to save his people in the time of famine, and God used the dreams of Joseph and the hatred of his brothers to accomplish that plan. And surely, God had to raise up a man with a dream to begin the destruction of the awful race prejudice that lay like a blanket over our land.
As we shall see in Genesis, Joseph's dreams came true, because they were God's dreams. Is it not possible that Martin Luther King's dream also will come true, because it comes from God? Our hatreds and prejudices are no match for the working of God, and we should be very cautious when we think to oppose him.
Lutheran Option -- 1 Kings 19:9-18
The time in our text is toward the beginning of the reign of the northern king of Israel, Ahab (ca. 869-850 B.C.), the son and successor of the great king, Omri. Ahab is highly successful in military battles, defeating the Syrians to the north and helping to turn back the incursion of the Assyrian Empire. He built magnificent buildings and dominated the southern kingdom of Judah, marrying his daughter Athaliah to Judah's king Jehoram.
Ahab himself is married to Jezebel, a daughter of the king of Tyre, and therein lies his difficulty. Jezebel is a worshiper and promoter of the cult of Baal, the nature god of fertility. As a result, Israel is saturated with idolatry and syncretism. Altars to the Lord are torn down, some of his prophets are put to death, and covenant faithfulness has become a thing of the past.
One man dares to defy Jezebel, however -- Elijah the Tishbite. In a contest with 400 of the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, Elijah shows them to be false prophets and demonstrates the sole deity of the Lord, who alone rules over all of nature, through famine and deluge (1 Kings 17). Consequently, the 400 prophets of Baal are slain, and in revenge, Jezebel vows to kill Elijah. So in our text, Elijah is fleeing for his life to Horeb (Sinai), "the mount of God," in the Arabian peninsula. It is there on the mount that God encounters his fleeing prophet. (Probably vv. 9b-11a are to be omitted from our text as duplicates of v. 11b, 14).
As is often the case with a theophany or appearance of the Lord, there are cosmic disturbances -- a great wind, an earthquake, and fire. But the text is careful to distinguish God from natural occurences (vv. 11-12). God is not "in" any of those phenomena. The Lord of hosts is no nature deity. Instead, God comes to his prophet in his Word -- "a voice of thin silence," the most mysterious of descriptions.
When God asks Elijah why he has fled, the prophet tells of the dreadful situation in Israel and claims that he alone is still faithful to the Lord. That is almost a blasphemous statement, for it implies that God has ceased to work among his covenant people in the North. It also has about it a certain self-righteousness, as if Elijah is saying, "Everyone else is false, and I alone am true," a statement that we sometimes hear from some angry church member in our day, who decides to abandon his church membership and leave behind all of those horrible sinners and hypocrites in the congregation.
Amazingly, God does not rebuke his self-congratulatory prophet. Instead, the Lord tells Elijah to get to work and, indeed, to start a revolution. Elijah is commanded to topple the powerful Omri dynasty represented by Ahab and Jezebel, to replace Ben-Hadad on the throne of Syria with the commoner Hazael, and to anoint Elisha as his prophetic successor (vv. 15-16). That's a tall order, but it demonstrates the power of the God who not only rules all nature but also the kingdoms of the earth. It's as if the Lord is telling his prophet: "You think I'm not at work, Elijah? Think again! I not only preserve the pure faith of 7,000 people in Israel. I also will work through you and through your successor to bring down kings by my mighty Word."
The story is a powerful witness to us. There are many times when it seems to us as if God has lost all control, as if we alone are faithful in the midst of our chaotic society, and as if the rest of humanity is pursuing its rebellious way. But the testimony is: "Remember! Remember the lordship of this mighty God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! Remember that he is King of kings and Lord of lords, and is working out his purpose for his world! Remember that death itself could not defeat him, and that his will be the victory over all faithlessness, all evil, all the powers that oppose him!" And then get to work, good Christians! Serve his purpose in your life! And then rejoice that his is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever!
Another version tells that when she started walking across the lake, one of the men tried to follow her. But with his first step onto the water, he went under. Emerging with gasps for air, the almost-drowned man asks, "What happened?" His friend says, "She knows where the stones are."
The story about Jesus in our Gospel certainly tickles the funny bone. But perhaps the story, like that of Elijah, has more to do with the God who controls nature and chaos than with the mystery of how to take a walk on the lake without getting wet.
1 Kings 19:9-18
Elijah was active as a prophet in the northern kingdom of Israel during the second quarter of the ninth century B.C. The dynasty of Omri was in power in the person of Ahab who was married to Jezebel, a Phoenician and the daughter of the king of Tyre. Jezebel's presence in the royal city of Samaria brought to a head the failure of the people of Israel to distinguish between Yahweh and Baal. Having defended the honor of Yahweh over Baal on Mount Carmel, Elijah had his followers slay Baal's prophets. Antagonized by his act, Jezebel set out to kill Elijah, forcing him to flee into the wilderness where he was so nourished by an angel that he was able to journey forty days and nights to Mount Horeb.
While the English translations do not normally notice, the first verse speaks of Elijah's arrival at "the cave." A specific cave that comes to mind when anyone tells about Mount Horeb is the "cleft in the rock" from which Moses once saw God's back (Exodus 33:17-23). This connection is substantiated in verse 11 with the words "and the Lord passed by," recalling Exodus 33:22 where the Lord's "glory passes by."
Having thus established himself at the spot where Moses once saw God, Elijah must have been full of anticipation of the same treat. Yet the Lord welcomed him to the spot with the question, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" Elijah explained his presence there by reciting the trouble brewing back home and explaining to God the fortune that in the midst of all those rebels, he alone -- Elijah -- is left and so he has taken refuge there.
The Lord responded to his harangue by offering an audio-visual demonstration. Taking the prophet out of the cave to stand on the mountain, the Lord showed him a powerful wind, an earthquake, and a fire -- all symbols of the presence of Baal, the Canaanite fertility god, and all used elsewhere in the Old Testament to demonstrate the Lord's presence (Exodus 19:16-18; 20:18; Isaiah 31:9). We call such natural demonstrations of the Lord's presence a theophany, literally, a god appearance. Here, however, the Lord was "not" in any of the phenomena of nature. What we have here is a lot of "phany" but no "theos."
Then comes "the sound of silence crushed." Imagine such a phrase so many centuries prior to Simon and Garfunkel!
The Lord again provided the same sound and light show as earlier and again asked the same question: "What are you doing here, Elijah?" And the prophet responded the same as before, obviously not getting the point of the demonstration.
Finally the Lord resorted to words. Or should we say "the word"? That word was the commissioning of the prophet to get off the mountain and go back into the fray, into historical involvement where the action is. Anoint kings! Anoint a prophetic successor! And by the way, remember that you are not the only one; there are seven thousand more in Israel.
The passage has special meaning for me. I told it to a group of children living in a squatters' village beside the dump of the city Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. My purpose was to help the children understand that God is not isolated in sacred places but involved in their very lives, present among them. That is one way to preach on the passage.
Another way is to recognize that though we fret over doing the Lord's work in a secular and violent society, God announces that the present and the future are in his hands. The chaos of life is the arena into which God sends us to make a difference.
Romans 10:5-15
Having struggled in the previous chapter with his pain over the disbelief of Israel, Paul moves on to announce how people of every nationality might be saved and how they can do what is necessary.
Paul begins his section here with the contrast between the righteousness that comes from obedience to the law (Moses) and the righteousness that comes from faith through the word. That latter righteousness is the one by which people are saved.
Of what does it consist? The verbal confession that "Jesus is Lord" and the accompanying belief that God raised him from the dead. The two are one and the same. According to the first words of this epistle Jesus Christ is declared to be Son of God and Lord because of his resurrection from the dead. Confessing Jesus as Lord means nothing less than believing that God raised him from the dead. This confession is the righteousness that comes from faith.
To demonstrate that salvation comes through this confession, Paul cites two passages from the Old Testament, both of which announce the same news, one in negative form, the other positively. First, Paul quotes Isaiah 28:16: "No one who believes in him will be put to shame." In the context of the prophecy of Isaiah this promise of salvation is offered to believers as salvation from the coming judgment. Second, he cites Joel 2:32: "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved." The verse is the culmination of that powerful prophecy in which Joel announces the outpouring of the Lord's Spirit on men and women, on old and young, on all levels of society (Joel 2:28-32) -- the passage that serves as Peter's explanation of the gift of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2). Truly the passage supports Paul's claim that "the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him" (v. 12; italics mine).
All that answers the first question about how can people be saved. Now we come to the means by which people can arrive at that point of confession.
Calling on the Lord means believing in him. Believing in him is dependent on hearing the word. Hearing the word requires someone to announce the word. And such messengers would never speak unless they are sent.
Reversing the sentences provides the proper sequence: God sends messengers, the messengers announce the word, the word is heard, the message heard is believed, the believers call on God, and so God saves them. The advantage of reversing Paul's order is that the whole sequence is thus more clearly seen as the work of God. Indeed the entire act of salvation begins with God's mission, that is, God's sending of people into the world so that others might be blessed. That divine mission began with the Lord's sending of Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 12:1-3 and continues with the church of every day right into our own.
The sequence also challenges the church of very day to recognize that receiving the word that saves is not the end. It is really the means to the end, that all might call on the name of the Lord and so be saved. As God sent Elijah down from his desired haven into the messy affairs of the world, so God sends all the mission people of God as messengers, even prophets, to a hearing-impaired world.
Matthew 14:22-33
After miraculously feeding the 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish, Jesus "made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds." The connection between the feeding miracle and that of walking on the sea is difficult to ascertain, as is the reason Jesus found it necessary to get the disciples out of the way. The same sequence of events occurs in all four gospels, but only John gives an explanation about the connection: the wish of the zealots for a leader who could stir up the crowds against Rome, and so they wanted to make Jesus their king. The feeding miracle would have provided the inspiration they were looking for, and perhaps Jesus wanted the disciples out of the way so they themselves would not get caught up in the political fervor.
Now what happens in our pericope drives home the point. Having dismissed the crowds, Jesus went up on the mountain (like Elijah) to pray and stayed until evening. By this time the boatload of disciples was caught in a vicious storm on the sea. Jesus now descended the mountain and came to them, "walking on the sea" (v. 25). The same Greek words appear in the Greek Old Testament at Job 9:8 where in a description of God's role in creation, the Lord "trampled on the waves of the Sea (monster)." The words in Job reflect the ancient myth that the chaos of the sea dragon must be controlled before God's orderly reign over creation can ensue (see Isaiah 27:1).
Applied to Jesus these same words announce once more who he is: the Son of God to whom authority over the Sea is transferred. They also announce that the enemy is the universal chaos that would destroy the peaceful and promised kingdom of God. Yet the good news is that in Jesus Christ, as Son of God, the kingdom of God dawns with his subjugation of chaos. In that sense the story is not different in its message from the calming of the sea in 8:23-27.
That sense of universal mission over the eschatological enemy might be the reason that Jesus refuses to get caught up in the local skirmishes of the day. The attempt of the zealots to make Jesus their king and lead them against Rome (admittedly John's interpretation) might be the reason Jesus shooed the disciples away before doing the same with the crowds. His battle was against a much bigger foe than a mere Roman Empire.
The walking on the sea caper culminates in Jesus' invitation to Peter to join him. Without thinking, that is, with blind faith, Peter stepped out of the boat and walked toward Jesus. Only when his fear of a strong wind overcame him did the apostle sink. His cry for help led Jesus to rescue him, but not without the master's reprimand for his lack of faith when the wind increased.
Now back safely in the boat, those who had witnessed the entire event worshiped Jesus, confessing, "Truly you are the Son of God." What led the disciples to that understanding was not simply the magical act. It was the realization on the basis of their Scripture that Jesus had performed an act reserved exclusively for the Lord God (Job 9:8). It was an act expressing power and even victory over the universal chaos of the Sea.
How paradoxical that the next time such a confession was uttered would be at the moment of public vulnerability, the moment of God's weakness on the cross of his Son (27:54). Faith in who Jesus is always seems to be caught up in this tension between weakness and strength, between winning and losing, between the devil and the surface of the blue sea.
God not only sent Elijah down from the mountain to become engrossed in the chaotic affairs of human history. God also sent his own Son down from the mountain in order to take on chaos itself and to invite his disciples to join him on the wave of victory.
In faith we take that step even without knowing where the stones are.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By Elizabeth Achtemeier
Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28
Here begins the collection of Joseph stories with which the rest of Genesis will be concerned. There are some contradictions within our text because we have the two sources of the Yahwist and the Elohist woven together. In verses 21-22, it is the northern forbear Reuben, born of Leah, who would save Joseph's life. In verses 26-27, it is Judah from the South. In verse 27, Joseph is to be sold to some passing Ishmaelites, but in verse 28, Midianite traders are the ones passing by. The interweaving of the two sources now serves to involve both northern and southern forbears in the rescue of Joseph from death, as well as to highlight the indecisiveness of the brothers about what to do with their young sibling.
But let's face it. Joseph is a brat, the spoiled youngest son of Jacob's old age, who is his father's favorite and a brash braggart at that. He rashly tells his brothers and parents about his dreams of superiority over them (vv. 5-11). And he lazes about in his long-sleeved coat, while his brothers have to work to tend the flocks. (The correct text says that the coat is not many-colored, but rather it has long sleeves which are for dress and not for work.) It is little wonder that Joseph's eleven brothers hate him and just want to be rid of him. Some of the brothers despise Joseph so much that they want to kill him, but the cooler heads of Reuben and Judah forestall that vengeance. So they settle for selling Joseph as a slave to the Midianite or Ishmaelite traders who are on their way to Egypt. In Egypt, the traders then sell the young lad to Potiphar, the captain of Pharaoh's guard (39:1).
Joseph is obviously an obedient son of his adoring father. When Jacob bids Joseph seek out his shepherding brothers to inquire after their welfare, Joseph immediately obeys (37:13). But he gets lost on the way. When he cannot find his brothers at Shechem, he wanders around in the hill country until a stranger tells him that the brothers have moved their flocks to Dothan, some miles north of Shechem in the region of Samaria. There the brothers are located, but Joseph has made a long trek from Hebron in the south to Dothan in the north.
The brothers, however, have no thought of offering Joseph food and drink and rest from his long journey. Instead, some of them immediately plot Joseph's death, and the words that they speak become a prophecy of everything that follows. "Here comes this dreamer," the brothers say. "Come now, let us kill him ... and we shall see what shall become of his dreams" (vv. 19-20).
Those prophetic words are quoted on a plaque on the motel in Memphis where Martin Luther King, Jr., was staying when he was killed. There could not be a more apt use of this quotation from the Joseph story, for the saying concerns the dreams of a dreamer -- Joseph in our text, and Martin Luther King in our time. "We shall see what shall become of his dreams."
What the brothers of Joseph did not realize and what our society has not always realized is that the dreams of Joseph and of King were not made up by the human dreamers. No. The dreams came from God. They were the sign and the foretaste of the plan that God was working out in the Genesis story and that he is working out in our world.
God had to send Joseph ahead into Egypt in order to save his people in the time of famine, and God used the dreams of Joseph and the hatred of his brothers to accomplish that plan. And surely, God had to raise up a man with a dream to begin the destruction of the awful race prejudice that lay like a blanket over our land.
As we shall see in Genesis, Joseph's dreams came true, because they were God's dreams. Is it not possible that Martin Luther King's dream also will come true, because it comes from God? Our hatreds and prejudices are no match for the working of God, and we should be very cautious when we think to oppose him.
Lutheran Option -- 1 Kings 19:9-18
The time in our text is toward the beginning of the reign of the northern king of Israel, Ahab (ca. 869-850 B.C.), the son and successor of the great king, Omri. Ahab is highly successful in military battles, defeating the Syrians to the north and helping to turn back the incursion of the Assyrian Empire. He built magnificent buildings and dominated the southern kingdom of Judah, marrying his daughter Athaliah to Judah's king Jehoram.
Ahab himself is married to Jezebel, a daughter of the king of Tyre, and therein lies his difficulty. Jezebel is a worshiper and promoter of the cult of Baal, the nature god of fertility. As a result, Israel is saturated with idolatry and syncretism. Altars to the Lord are torn down, some of his prophets are put to death, and covenant faithfulness has become a thing of the past.
One man dares to defy Jezebel, however -- Elijah the Tishbite. In a contest with 400 of the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, Elijah shows them to be false prophets and demonstrates the sole deity of the Lord, who alone rules over all of nature, through famine and deluge (1 Kings 17). Consequently, the 400 prophets of Baal are slain, and in revenge, Jezebel vows to kill Elijah. So in our text, Elijah is fleeing for his life to Horeb (Sinai), "the mount of God," in the Arabian peninsula. It is there on the mount that God encounters his fleeing prophet. (Probably vv. 9b-11a are to be omitted from our text as duplicates of v. 11b, 14).
As is often the case with a theophany or appearance of the Lord, there are cosmic disturbances -- a great wind, an earthquake, and fire. But the text is careful to distinguish God from natural occurences (vv. 11-12). God is not "in" any of those phenomena. The Lord of hosts is no nature deity. Instead, God comes to his prophet in his Word -- "a voice of thin silence," the most mysterious of descriptions.
When God asks Elijah why he has fled, the prophet tells of the dreadful situation in Israel and claims that he alone is still faithful to the Lord. That is almost a blasphemous statement, for it implies that God has ceased to work among his covenant people in the North. It also has about it a certain self-righteousness, as if Elijah is saying, "Everyone else is false, and I alone am true," a statement that we sometimes hear from some angry church member in our day, who decides to abandon his church membership and leave behind all of those horrible sinners and hypocrites in the congregation.
Amazingly, God does not rebuke his self-congratulatory prophet. Instead, the Lord tells Elijah to get to work and, indeed, to start a revolution. Elijah is commanded to topple the powerful Omri dynasty represented by Ahab and Jezebel, to replace Ben-Hadad on the throne of Syria with the commoner Hazael, and to anoint Elisha as his prophetic successor (vv. 15-16). That's a tall order, but it demonstrates the power of the God who not only rules all nature but also the kingdoms of the earth. It's as if the Lord is telling his prophet: "You think I'm not at work, Elijah? Think again! I not only preserve the pure faith of 7,000 people in Israel. I also will work through you and through your successor to bring down kings by my mighty Word."
The story is a powerful witness to us. There are many times when it seems to us as if God has lost all control, as if we alone are faithful in the midst of our chaotic society, and as if the rest of humanity is pursuing its rebellious way. But the testimony is: "Remember! Remember the lordship of this mighty God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! Remember that he is King of kings and Lord of lords, and is working out his purpose for his world! Remember that death itself could not defeat him, and that his will be the victory over all faithlessness, all evil, all the powers that oppose him!" And then get to work, good Christians! Serve his purpose in your life! And then rejoice that his is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever!