Seeking, Sending

Proper 14A: Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28; Psalm 105:1-6, 16-22, 45b

Romans 10:5-15; Matthew 14:22-33

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

August 9, 2026

https://vimeo.com/1218733411?fl=pl&fe=sh

Good Morning, St. Aidan’s.

When I was a Junior in high school a significant portion of the year in my English class was dedicated to reading various sections of the Bible – particularly the Hebrew Bible, but also the New Testament. My school was secular and we read the Bible critically, as literature. It was in this class that I can first remember hearing the story of Joseph, sections of which are assigned to us today and next Sunday. We probably spent a week on it, my teacher was so moved by it. And I could see why – it is a striking and provocative story, with complicated family dynamics, violence, deception, grief, resilience and unexpected transformation. It is a story for our time.

Joseph is a complicated figure who comes from a tangled family. He is the eleventh of the twelve sons of Israel, as he his father had been renamed by the divine wrestler in the passage we heard last week (Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28). Yet Joseph was more specifically the first of the two sons born by Rachel with whom Israel was deeply in love. Israel, you may recall from our first reading two weeks ago (Genesis 29:15-28), had been deceived by his father-in-law Laban into marrying Rachel’s sister Leah first, because she was the elder of the two sisters. Seven years would pass before Isreal could also marry Rachel. (And here we should note that the Bible itself bears witness to how relationships, marriage practices, and gendered and cultural biases clearly change over time – there is no such thing as a timeless, simple idea of “biblical marriage.) Leah and Israel had six sons and one daughter, Dinah. Leah and Rachel’s maids Bilhah and Zilpah each had two sons with Israel. Finally Rachel had Joseph and several years later died shortly after giving birth to Benjamin, last of the twelve sons.

Israel favored the sons of Rachel over the other children, and this caused problems even as Joseph didn’t exactly alleviate the tension with his brothers by how he handled his favored status. Joseph was a dreamer. Later, in Egypt, his skill in dream interpretation would play a key role in the turning of his fortune. Early on, in a portion of the story skipped by our passage, his dreams, blithely shared, cause his brothers to “hate him even more.” In one dream he and his brothers are in a field, binding sheaves. “Suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright; then your sheaves gathered around it, and bowed down to my sheaf” (37:7).  In another dream, he reports, “the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me” (37:9). His brothers understandably heard these dreams as expressions of superiority, of threat. As next week’s reading will make clear, these dreamscapes also convey what would come to pass in Egypt. I wonder in what spirit Joseph conveyed them? Did he intend to “brag” – performing the “spoiled and selfish” “brat” as Madeline L’Engle forthrightly calls him in her book Sold Into Egypt?^[1] Meanwhile, his father had made Joseph a fancy coat (37:3), a garment whose sleeve length in the original Hebrew signaled that its wearer was not intended for manual labor.^[2] The Greek rendering of this term that made its way into Christian tradition, including  in older English translations, was “a coat of many colors.” In the words of one commentator, it was a “highly embroidered, ornamented tunic.”^[3] The queer playwright Peterson Toscano, who presented portions of his play “Transfigurations: Transgressing Gender in the Bible” here before the pandemic, has a wonderful segment on Joseph in which he refers to the garment as a “princess dress.”^[4] This garment would become the identifying sign of the brothers betrayal and his loss.

But first he would seek them out. His father had prompted him to find and bring back a report on his brothers (37: 13-14). This was some time after Joseph had earlier brought his father a “bad report” about two of his brothers, no doubt furthering their ire (37:2). When Joseph arrived in Shechem where he expected to find them, they were gone. A random man who found him wandering the fields then asked him a strikingly open question, “what are you seeking?” It is the same open question that Jesus asks two disciples who had begun to follow him at the beginning of the Gospel of John, the very first words Jesus speaks in that Gospel “What do you seek?” (John 1:38) Joseph’s answer to the mystery man is simple: “I am seeking my brothers” (37:16). On the surface it is a straight-forward reply. Joseph had been sent by his father for that purpose. Yet when I think of Joseph’s fraught relationship with his brothers, all that had passed between them even as so much more was to come, I cannot help but hear in this phrase, as in its prompting question, a deeper search, a longing for relationship across profound disconnection. Now perhaps this reading sounds overly optimistic. After all, Joseph’s previous actions – his grandiose dream disclosures, the bad brother report he had earlier issued – suggest a shallower, more self-serving search. Yet sometimes people seek attention, connection, and love in highly counterintuitive, or even self-destructive ways. They may not know how to ask for what they deeply long for. Or there may be barriers in their context that prevent them from being truly seen, so much so that the only way to reach for connection is to press up against and cross over the borders of their world. I see in Joseph a seeking that propels him outward, far beyond what he could imagine he would encounter or endure. In seeking, he becomes sent.

Tragically, when eventually he finds his brothers, as they see him approaching from afar, they plot revenge from out of their woundedness, not simply their jealousy but, it seems to me, but their rage at their father’s rejection in favor of this junior sibling who doesn’t play by their rules. “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” (37:19-20). Dreams, writes Miguel de la Torre, “Are dangerous and those who dream them must be killed, for they point to a reality that does not yet exist. The wish usually held by those who are oppressed and marginalized for a world undergirded by social justice is all too often dismissed as utopian by those benefiting by the present social structures.”^[5] To be sure, Joseph’s dreams may not have appeared to his brothers – indeed, perhaps even to us – to convey such a just reality. They appeared to place the dreamer on a pedestal, one that undermined the stature of his brothers. Yet dreams can express so much more than meets the eye. And so violence, treachery, deception ensue, as well as conflict about how and whether the brothers should carry out their horrific plot. Here a splicing of different textual sources can explain the conflicting account of Reuben’s intervention versus Judah’s; as the twelve brothers represented to later generations the twelve tribal communities of Israel, their story traditions favored their forebears differently.^[6] In the end Joseph is sold to Ishmaelites, descendants of Ishmael, their grandfather Isaac’s brother born to Hagar who was from Egypt. To Egypt they would take Joseph, where his gift of dreaming would finally change all their lives.

This transformative outcome is expressed in the idea, expressed by our Psalm that God “sent” Joseph to Egypt. We will hear this notion again next week as Joseph’s Egyptian saga comes to a close. So impactful is the work Joseph would go on to do in Egypt, that subsequent generations could not help but see his arrival there – even amid its horror – as somehow attended by God. “[God] sent a man before them, Joseph, who was sold as a slave,” the Psalm intones (Psalm 105:17). This Psalm tells ancestral stories, not unlike a creed in function, to remind its readers of God’s presence in a pattern whose transformative outcome is wondrous to behold even as its manner of unfolding fills us with questions.^[7] What does it mean for a lifelong search across borders and boundaries to become so accompanied by God that one is somehow, simultaneously sent?

To step forward in seeking is ultimately to step out in faith. Peter does this in our gospel passage in a wonderfully striking story that is unique to Matthew. He does this on a ship, violently shaking, trembling in fear, disbelieving that the person they see could be walking on water, that this person could be Jesus. If it is you, Peter says, let me come to you. Let me seek you (Matthew 14:28). To which the answer, from Jesus, is come. Come. Step out into the choppy waters, amid danger, projection, chasmic misunderstandings that you will encounter in the world, that you will be entangled in. Search anyway. Keep searching. Seek me even though you do not know how. And even if, when, you sink, I will grab you. Only keep searching. Keep questing. Be willing to step out, even amid the ambiguity, the danger, the mystery. The world depends upon our searching. It depends upon our willingness risk connection.  I am sending you. I am with you always, even to the end of the age. Our ultimate end is transformation, and we are privileged to be a part of that process together. Thanks be to God.

^[1] Madeleine L’Engle, Sold Into Egypt: Joseph’s Journey into Human Being (New York: Guideposts, 1989), 11, 26.

^[2] Miguel A. de la Torre, Genesis: A Theological Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 301.

^[3] Michael Carden, “Genesis” in ed. Deryn Guest et al, The Queer Bible Commentary (London, UK: SCM Press, 2006), 52.

^[4] Peterson Toscano’s website: https://www.petersontoscano.com. His papers are at Bryn Mawr College: https://archives.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/resources/hcmc-1351  See also this description of the play: https://otherwisechristian.com/2019/07/08/transfigurations-transgressing-gender-in-the-bible-dvd/

^[5] De la Torre, 302

^[6] De la Torre, 304

^[7] Walter Brueggemann and William H. Bellinger, Jr., Psalms. New Cambridge Bible Commentary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 452-453.