(next in the series Lessons in the Beginning)
Texts on Sunday, September 25, 2005
Genesis 41:1–42:5; Luke 9: 13-17
“There is no way you can interpret your own dreams,” a psychotherapist once told me. “They are information in coded form, tales about those feelings and needs which you have been unable to face, whatever the reason. If with your waking mind you were aware of these feelings and needs, they wouldn’t be hidden, so you would not need to dream about them. Dream work is about becoming aware of what lies in the shadows, so that in your next dream you can press ever deeper into the dark.”
We have been interpreting the Genesis stories like dreams. As with a dream, we don’t assume the events actually happened. The foundation for our understanding is much more solid than that. It is the fact that people have been telling these stories for hundreds on hundreds of years–telling them to their therapist, you might say; to God within; to the Healer of the Breach. Whether they know it or not, and whether their guides have been wise or dull, Christians and Jews have been telling the stories in order to have some degree of access to great truths that lie in the shadows of waking knowledge.
Now, one way or another, the spirit of each adult knows that if there is to come any growth, any way out of the present misery, she and he must give something up. People know that fact as an idea; the eye of the intellect shifts a little and takes the idea in. But knowing the need for relinquishment deep enough for it to move you to the courage of new action–that’s a different kind of knowing. Here, the whole “I” moves, not just the intellect; your whole self shifts, and with it, of course, come new insight and perspective. Religious tradition calls this spiritual growth. We are reading Genesis like a dream in hope that you who have ears to hear might experience, even for a moment, this shift of identity called spiritual growth, and catch the dream vision of Genesis. It is grounded in a radically transformative insight: What you thought was your enemy is not your enemy–because who you thought you were, you are no longer. When enough individuals in any small tribe catch this vision, the tribe moves beyond its fear of extinction to develop into a great pathway for the generations. This is the lesson in the beginning, again and again.
The name of Egypt appears throughout these stories. To the long-ago listeners of the Genesis tales, Egypt meant one thing: the loathed neighbor, immense and powerful unlike us, who once held our ancestors in severe bondage. Egypt stands for “the worst thing that could happen to us.” If Genesis is a dream, Egypt is a nightmare. And yet, Egypt already appears in these stories but a sentence or two after Abraham himself is introduced in Genesis 12. There, Yahweh has promised fruitful and secure dwelling for his descendants in the bountiful land through which he is passing. Yet no sooner have Abraham and Sarah set their suitcases down for the weekend, but God’s good land fails. “There was a famine in the land, so Abram went down to Egypt to reside there as an alien, for the famine was severe in the land.” (Gen 12.10) Did you ever have a recurring dream? This is it, Israel talking in her sleep. Her dream is saying: “Your worst fear . . . is not what you think.”
How often we have traced the two bright threads that run through the jumble of Genesis folklore: dire threat to Abraham’s lineage braided with accounts of bitter hatreds. By this point in the story, however, our heroes seem to have overcome their worst obstacles. Jacob’s boys are at last many, and married to mothers of many, and living in that land of Canaan once promised to Abraham. Things should be looking up for Israel. But alas, “famine became severe throughout the world.” The looming threat to the tribe of Israel is total once more.
Last week, we saw wisdom for growth coiled inside Tamar as a desire so intense that she was able to break through the most encompassing restraints on sexual behavior in order to get on with growth. Using Plato’s definition, we called that desire in her to thrive eros. This story is still about that eros, but it comes at the question from a different angle, as if to say, if the symbol of sexual demand didn’t stir your pot, an empty stomach will. In Genesis 38, Judah was listless and unconcerned about his development. Here all the brothers share in the error. Father Jacob says with frustration, “Why do you keep looking at one another?” Like Judah, they seem incapable of action. Jacob says, “I have heard that there is grain in Egypt.” Surely the sons–indeed, everyone in the land–would have heard this too. But Egypt–the very axis of evil in the ears of the listeners in the days when this story was written down–is the land to which they’d sold their brother as a slave. It is no wonder they cannot act forthrightly in their own interests. Egypt shelters the shadow of their evil. They are unacknowledged co-conspirators in the gross injustice of slavery in Egypt, even their brother’s slavery. This psychological and spiritual insight sees long and deep into the shadows. Until we see our complicity in the evils we despise, we cannot help ourselves; we need spiritual guidance. The tragedy of America’s political leaders is their astounding spiritual ignorance of our complicity in the evils they despise. The spirit of evil feeds on their willful ignorance. It takes a Father Jacob, one transformed from hatred and guilt in the wrestling at the river, to know what must be done. “Go down to Egypt and buy, that we may live and not die.”
None of the brothers can possibly know that the brother whom they hated and even thought to kill is no longer slave, but slave-master now, ruling over all Egypt and holding in his hands the power of life and death. Were their guilt and fear of death coupled with knowledge of their brother’s power to avenge himself, they would be frozen, unable to follow their father’s guidance. They would perish in hunger. So the future of the nation hangs on the odd blessing of their not knowing facts which they would interpret to their hurt. How like them we are, who not seldom look back and see what we had not seen, and realize that we would have been too rash to make a right choice if we had been supplied with certain “facts.” As the brothers prepare for the dreadful journey, Genesis’ two threads, threat to the tribe and the long bitterness of hatred, are now anchored even more firmly than before in the eye of the needle as it is thrust back into the text to weave another line of the fabric. Genesis won’t change the subject until the subject changes. You are the subject. And this is your dream. Are you hungry enough to move to the place you most fear?
What do you fear the most? You could take the question personally and individually. Here we have often sent thought home in that direction, proposing that just on the other side of the curtain of time and fear, your God is waiting. So do take the question home, take it to heart. This story, however, is so concretely about a group–a tribe, a community–that we would be avoiding the subject if we considered it only as separate individuals. What do you, who are the church, fear the most? What is your Egypt? What looms like bondage and hard labor in your imagination? Remember: they wrote this story down when they had a city and a temple, yet Egypt stood three hundred miles to the south, a ravening power in evil memory. What to you, who have a city and a temple, is Egypt? Who is your enemy, and who, do you fear, rules there? (1)
How clear your answers are. Why then do you keep looking at each other? There is grain in Egypt. For many years, our church has eaten from the stores of its former stewards. More than half of the present good income of the church derives not from ourselves, but from the buildings built and bought by former stewards. Indeed, through many decades, the church has been unwilling to move on, though the stores have dwindled. Now there is famine in the land. See how the dream speaks. Only hunger will lead us to go where we must go, for before we were hungry, we would not move. And even when we knew which way we must go, we would not. We would not change anything. We would not try anything significantly new. We were afraid of Egypt. So you need wisdom, to feel your spiritual hunger, for only spiritual hunger can guide this congregation in the way it must go. What is your spiritual hunger? If you say to yourself, “I do not feel spiritual hunger; I do not know what that is,” then get hungry to learn what spiritual hunger is, for this is the sole concern of Jesus Christ, whom you call Lord. What is that which you desire more than anything that will impel you to get up and go toward the food God alone can give? (2)
In the story of the feeding of five thousand families on a mountainside, Jesus tells his disciples “You give them something to eat.” You have what is needed to meet the hunger of the nation. It is with you already, both the hunger and the wisdom to meet it. But like Jacob’s sons. the disciples are afraid and without courage. You mean, buy groceries for all these people? At this hour? Where? They revert to literal interpretation. They kill the Spirit. Jesus then undertakes to celebrate the communion meal for them and with them.
When the meal is over, baskets full of pieces are collected, twelve in all. Why twelve? Don’t say that it’s because someone counted, and twelve is how many baskets were there. It is a dream. Don’t be literal. Don’t kill the Spirit. It is twelve baskets for the twelve disciples. But why twelve disciples? There were many more than that. You see this now: The twelve disciples stand for the twelve tribes of Israel, a renewal of the promise of God’s gift of communion for all brothers beyond all hatred and devastation. Yet the lesson in Genesis today is that that communion is not complete. The lesson in Buffalo today, in the church today, is that that communion is not complete. Only eleven are gathered under the guidance of the father. The twelve are not one, not yet, for the twelfth is in Egypt. Go there, and he will feed you.
1. Here the congregation offered real answers to this set of questions.
2. Here, the congregation was silent with no answers, but engaged.
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, September 2005
Recent Comments