Come Closer

Proper 15A: Genesis 45:1-15; Psalm 133

Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32; Matthew 15:21-28

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

August 16, 2026

Good Morning, St. Aidan’s.

Last week we heard the first part of the saga of Joseph. He was, you may recall, the twelfth of Israel’s thirteen children, eleventh of his twelve sons, first of the two sons who born to his father’s favored wife Rachel. Because he was his mother’s son, in childhood he was favored, spared harder tasks. He was known to “give ill reports” (or tattle) on his brothers, undermining their trust. He was also a dyed in the wool dreamer, unselfconscious or perhaps pretentious enough to share dreams that seemed to show him lording it over his brothers. They came to deeply resent him. We heard last week how one day his father asked him to find his brothers in the field where they were keeping the sheep. At first he could not find them. He came upon a random man in the field who seemed to have noticed something was amiss. “What are you seeking?” the man asked. “I am searching for my brothers,” Joseph responded. I heard in this straight-forward reply a deeper longing, a desire Joseph likely did not know how to express, to step across the family disconnect. With new direction he found his brothers. But as they saw him from afar, tragically, they plotted revenge: “Here comes this dreamer,” they said. “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” (Genesis 37:20). The “they” is not specified – all of them seemed initially to be in on this plot. But then it shifted. Reuben, and then later Judah, are credited by a multi-sourced text with pivoting the plot and saving him from death.^[1] Yet even if Joseph’s life was initially spared, his outcome was still horrific to endure. At the close of last week’s reading, we heard he was sold to Ishmaelites who would bring him in slavery into Egypt. Joseph’s searching had led to him into deep pain. But how to make sense of this against the backdrop of a massive plot twist signaled by a verse in last week’s Psalm: “[God] had sent a man ahead of [the children of Israel,] Joseph, who was sold as a slave” (Psalm 105:16). Joseph searched, while God sent.  

Joseph the seeker, the dreamer, had landed in a horrific scenario. The passage we heard this morning as our first reading skips so much – from chapter thirty-seven last week, to chapter forty-five today. I highly recommend reading the chapters in between. Initially he serves in the house of the captain of the guard, Potiphar. But when he refuses the seduction of Potifar’s wife, she accuses him of assaulting her and he is imprisoned (Gen. 39). In the midst of suffering, God is with him, surrounding him with what the text calls “steadfast love,” showing him favor, the text says (Gen. 39:21, 23; and earlier: 39:4). Whatever Joseph did, God “made it prosper,” both in prison and out of it (Gen. 39:3, 23). That steadfast love does not prevent Joseph from experiencing the horror of human betrayal, misunderstanding, judgment, and jealousy.^[2] Instead, God’s steadfastness seems to support him, giving him energy to keep going, to keep dreaming, and indeed to develop and deploy the interpretation of dreams.^[3] He becomes known for this unusual skill. Eventually Pharaoh himself seeks out the dreamer and makes him the highest ranked member of his court, proactively planning for the famine that, as Joseph interpreted it, Pharaoh’s dreams had foretold (Gen. 41). This was the very famine that would bring Joseph’s family from Canaan into Egypt, causing a reunion with his brothers. Our reading this morning conveys the concluding chapter of this saga. Joseph’s searching and God’s sending seem to work together in the midst of this tangled, painful process. Human pain and divine steadfast love interweave in ways difficult to make sense of, or to know quite how to hold.

Whereas last week the Psalm pressed this paradox of human freedom and agency and divine intention, this week it is Joseph himself who does so. He himself says to his astonished brothers, “do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life” (Gen. 45:5). And then again shortly thereafter, “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth” (Gem 45:7) and then a third time one verse later: “So it was not you who sent me here, but God” (Gen. 45:8).^[4]  God sent him there? What about the treachery of his brothers? Are they not accountable? As I sit with this story, even as I am moved by Joseph’s magnanimity in this moment, by what we might say is his forgiveness of his kin, I have several thoughts. First, as sections of the story that our passage skipped over make clear, Joseph was not without the impulse for revenge. He had not completely worked through or risen above the interpersonal pain that his previous experiences had caused, starting with his brothers actions. He makes his brothers suffer before he brings them to this moment of reckoning. When they he first saw them on an earlier trip to Egypt to seek out grain, “he recognized them, but he treated them like strangers and spoke harshly to them [saying,] ‘Where do you come from?’” (Gen. 42:7) He held them all hostage, then released all but one, Simeon, to go retrieve his youngest brother Benjamin, the last of Israel’s children, the second son of his beloved Rachel who had died giving birth to him (Gen 42). After Benjamin had been brought to him, after he had fed them a sumptuous meal and sent them back on their way to Israel, he manipulated them further, having his divination cup hidden in Benjamin’s pack and threatening to keep him as a slave when the fake theft was discovered (Gen. 44). Yet even in this intricately returned favor, so to speak, this separation of brothers from one another that recapitulates his own experience, Joseph is simultaneously reaching across the divide, seeking, searching for connection with the whole of his family, forcing a reckoning reunion. And in that searching, once again, the steadfastness of divine love emerges, working amid the pain, the searching, stoking a larger, more restorative outcome.^[5]

Last week the line that stood out to me, that I found myself sitting with, was the question asked by the random man in the field, “what are your seeking?” followed by Joseph’s response, “I am searching for my brothers.” This week the line that leaps out at me is Joseph’s urgent call, “come closer to me” (Gen. 45:4). Come closer to me. He says it after he is no longer able to control his emotions, notably just after he has sent everyone from his Egyptian life – interpreters and attendants – away from him.^[6] After he has wept so loudly that “the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it” (Gen. 45:2). After he had declared himself to his brothers, telling them who he actually was. After they were so overcome that words failed them. Come closer. Cross this broken trail. Stand before me so that I may tell you who I am, who we are as I see it, where we stand now.  He laid out before them the unbelievable saga in which they were woven, that was becoming their family story. A story in which they indeed sold him (Gen. 45:4, 5a), but God ultimately sent him (45:5b, 7). The only way to conceive the depths of these paradoxical truths was to come closer.

Twenty-six years ago this summer, my family and I said goodbye to my maternal grandmother. I’ve shared stories of her with you before. I don’t recall if I’ve shared this one. At the point when we were aware she only had hours left, we gathered around her – my mom, my sister, my grandfather and I, in her hospital room. A priest came to pray with us – Bruce O’Neil, in fact, who is the longstanding rector of St. Clement’s, Berkeley. Sometime after he left, we stood around Grandma’s bed as she was in and out of consciousness. We told her we loved her, and we shared memories of appreciation. She could hear us. At a certain point she was able to speak. “Come close,” she said. We scooted closer to the bed. Then she repeated it: “come close.” We scootched closer. “Come close, come close!” she repeated fiercely. We climbed into bed alongside her, one on either side. My mom remarked on how grandma had always been a great snuggler. There was a brief moment of quiet rest. And then Grandma said, “okay, let go.” We were uncertain what she meant. “Let go,” her volume increased. We began to scootch back away from her, giving her space. “Let go! Let go! Let go!” she repeated until we stood alongside her bed once again.

Last week I asked, “What does it mean for a lifelong search across borders and boundaries to become so accompanied by God that one is somehow, simultaneously sent?” Sent by God in the midst and on the other side of the most difficult contexts of our lives, in which accountabilities to pain are not somehow swept away but are held in trust by the Spirit of Truth. This week I wonder, how might we come closer? How might our searching embolden us to risk deeper relationship, making our way right up to the borders of the painful disconnections in our lives, so that we may hear and tell difficult stories? And in so doing, can we trust God enough to let go? To let go into God, in trust that God’s love will never leave us behind? My prayer in the most deeply challenging circumstances of our lives, our families, our communities, our world in this deeply painful and perilous moment, is that with all our hearts we would seek to join God’s own steadfastness.

^[1] Miguel A. De La Torre, Genesis: A Theological Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 304.

^[2] Miguel De La Torre, Genesis, 315

^[3] In all these circumstances, “God was there,” as Madeleine L’Engle emphasizes in Sold Into Egypt: Joseph’s Journey into Human Being (New York: Guideposts, 1989), 234-5. And as Miguel De La Torre writes, “The good news is not that Joseph prospers because the Lord is with him, but that the Lord is with Joseph. God is present in blessings and through hardships, in feast and in famine. Whether one is sitting on a throne or hanging from a cross, one is never alone.” Genesis,  315.

^[4] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1982), 345.

^[5] Brueggemann writes, “The revengeful cunning of the successful brother is superseded. He has no need to triumph over his family. The guilt of the brothers, the grief of the father, and the revenge of Joseph are all used as means for this disclosure of the hidden call of God. None of that matters now, for the whole family is now brought to a new moment.” Genesis, 346. (Italics Brueggemann’s)

^[6] As Brueggemann writes, “The power to create newness does not come from detachment, but from risky, self-disclosing engagement.” Genesis, 345.