02/15/2026 - Genesis 37:1-4, 12-14, 18-28
Scripture: Genesis 37:1-4, 12-14, 18-28
Jacob lived in the land of Canaan where his father was an immigrant. This is the account of Jacob’s descendants. Joseph was 17 years old and tended the flock with his brothers. While he was helping the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives, Joseph told their father unflattering things about them. Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons because he was born when Jacob was old. Jacob had made for him a long robe. When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of his brothers, they hated him and couldn’t even talk nicely to him.
Joseph had a dream and told it to his brothers, which made them hate him even more. He said to them, “Listen to this dream I had. When we were binding stalks of grain in the field, my stalk got up and stood upright, while your stalks gathered around it and bowed down to my stalk.”
His brothers said to him, “Will you really be our king and rule over us?” So they hated him even more because of the dreams he told them.
Joseph’s brothers went to tend their father’s flocks near Shechem. Israel said to Joseph, “Aren’t your brothers tending the sheep near Shechem? Come, I’ll send you to them.”
And he said, “I’m ready.”
Jacob said to him, “Go! Find out how your brothers are and how the flock is, and report back to me.”
So Jacob sent him from the Hebron Valley.
They saw Joseph in the distance before he got close to them, and they plotted to kill him. The brothers said to each other, “Here comes the big dreamer. Come on now, let’s kill him and throw him into one of the cisterns, and we’ll say a wild animal devoured him. Then we will see what becomes of his dreams!”
When Reuben heard what they said, he saved him from them, telling them, “Let’s not take his life.” Reuben said to them, “Don’t spill his blood! Throw him into this desert cistern, but don’t lay a hand on him.” He intended to save Joseph from them and take him back to his father.
When Joseph reached his brothers, they stripped off Joseph’s long robe, took him, and threw him into the cistern, an empty cistern with no water in it. When they sat down to eat, they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, with camels carrying sweet resin, medicinal resin, and fragrant resin on their way down to Egypt. Judah said to his brothers, “What do we gain if we kill our brother and hide his blood? Come on, let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites. Let’s not harm him because he’s our brother; he’s family.” His brothers agreed. When some Midianite traders passed by, they pulled Joseph up out of the cistern. They sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver, and they brought Joseph to Egypt.
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Have you seen the musical, “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat?” Or the movie with Donny Osmond? I was absolutely obsessed with the musical when I was a little kid, to the point my grandma made me my own “coat of many colors,” and I can still sing most of the songs to this day.
And out of pretty much all of the stories in the Bible, Joseph is the story that has the perfect amount of drama, intrigue, betrayal, forgiveness, and hope to make for a wonderful musical - or, honestly, a soap opera.
If we were to read the entire story, we’d be here for a while - it’s over thirteen chapters long. From Joseph receiving his coat from his father, to the dreams of him holding power over his brothers, to being sold into slavery in Egypt, to rising up to be the second-in-command of the country and ultimately rescuing his family from famine, the story of Joseph is a saga of love, hope, and seeing how God can bring beauty from ashes.
But today we’re just going to focus on the beginning of the story, with Joseph being far from that second-in-command of Egypt. Instead, he’s just a spoiled seventeen year old kid, with ten older half-brothers who are anything but the biggest fans.
And I think we get a hint at one reason why in verse 2: “While he was helping the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives, Joseph told their father unflattering things about them.”
The verses go on to talk about how much Jacob favors Joseph over his brothers, with the point being that all his other brothers hated him due to jealousy. Which Joseph certainly did not help with his propensity to tattle on his brothers.
And I think that little inclusion of Joseph not necessarily being the nicest to his brothers helps bring a bit of his character forward. He’s a spoiled seventeen year old kid. And who hasn’t seen kids tattle on their siblings to their parents? And who wouldn’t be mad if their little brother started repeatedly telling them that he was dreaming that he’d rule over them, maybe poking them in the shoulder for the sixtieth time that day as he did so? If we take these exchanges out of their context, it feels like petty sibling squabbles, with a big dash of parental favoritism thrown in.
But these fights and these sibling dynamics aren’t happening without any context. And they go much, much deeper than just petty squabbling.
In fact, the book of Genesis is rife with siblings either estranged from each other, or in conflict. From as early as chapter four, we see Cain and Able, Adam and Eve’s oldest sons, in conflict. Cain is so consumed with jealousy that he kills his brother because God preferred Able’s sacrifices to Cain’s. Isaac had an older half-brother, Ishmael, from whom he was estranged. This was because Abraham had sent Ishmael and his mother Hagar away, so Isaac would be the sole inheritor of his wealth. And last week we talked about Jacob and Esau, Isaac’s sons, who were twin brothers caught in a decades-long feud over, among other things, a bowl of stew and their father’s blessing. Much of their conflict was rooted in Jacob’s jealousy over Esau being the older brother, made worse by Isaac’s favoritism of Esau and Rebekah favoriting Jacob.
But apparently Jacob didn’t learn from how his parents had treated him. Instead he perpetuates the same favoritism, openly preferring one of his sons over the others, to the point where his other sons notice it, and hate their younger brother for it. And their jealousy grows and grows until they get to the point where they plot to kill their younger brother. Because they believe it will establish some level of equality between the rest of the brothers, just as their uncle Esau had believed that killing Jacob would give him back his inheritance and blessings. In both cases, they see their actions as restoring the world to the way it was supposed to be.
But in reality, the cycle of jealousy and violence is just continuing on.
Today we know that family systems often have patterns in them, and what affects one generation is often passed on to the next in some way. And in looking at the family line of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, we can see these patterns of jealousy, favoritism, estrangement, and continuing violence. Not only does this happen within individual families, but it happens in other kinds of systems - cultural, social, political, and religious ones. The story of the family of Abraham is, essentially, the story of human history - of how what one generation goes through affects the generations to follow. And how the generations that follow often are likely to repeat the same behaviors and patterns they inherited, unless we do the work to pull them apart and adopt healthier ways.
And as a country, I think we’re living through one of those patterns now. The violence we’ve seen for over a year now here in the Chicagoland area, in Minneapolis, and in so many other cities is far from the first time this has happened. We can see the threads that tie it to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, where peaceful protestors and innocent bystanders were also violently attacked by the authorities and by their neighbors alike.
And this isn’t even the first time that US citizens have had to face arrest and deportation even though they are legal citizens. From 1954 to 1955, thousands of US citizens of Mexican descent were caught up in a deportation operation and sent to Mexico along with hundreds of thousands of other people, with no due process while enduring inhumane treatment.
We’ve been here before. But that doesn’t mean we have to stay here. We are more than capable of breaking the cycle. And so was Joseph, trapped as he seemed in his own family’s cycle of violence that came to a head in our passage today.
When Joseph’s brothers saw him walking towards them over the heads of the sheep they were herding, they said, “Here comes the big dreamer. Come on now, let’s kill him and throw him into one of the cisterns, and we’ll say a wild animal devoured him. Then we will see what becomes of his dreams!” It’s a not-so-subtle bit of foreshadowing, because what becomes of Joseph’s dreams is that they come true. He dreams of a coming famine while in Egypt, and proves himself to the pharaoh as the person able and willing to prepare the country to weather the storm. He becomes the pharaoh’s second-in-command, in the perfect position to save his family from starving to death. Instead of perpetuating the cycle of violence and using the famine to take revenge on his brothers for what they did to him, Joseph set that aside. He forgave them, and brought them to Egypt where they would be safe, well-fed, and cared for.
I think, or at least I hope, we all have dreams of a better world, one of peace and love and joy without fear. But when we turn on the TV or scroll through social media, it can often seem like we are so far away from that world, and that the problems are so big and vast that there’s no way we could ever tackle them.
This is something that humanity has struggled with for generations, and it’s why stories like Joseph’s are so important. How do we break the cycles of violence, poverty, fear, and pain that we see all around us? Well, there’s a quote often attributed to a monk in the 12th century that came to this conclusion:
“When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.
I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.
When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town.
I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.
Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.”
And Joseph is an example of this. Over the course of his time in Egypt, it’s clear he did a lot of self-reflection and work to forgive his family, and even then, a few mean and petty actions worked their way in to his exchanges with his brothers after they were reunited. But ultimately, he did it. He managed to work past the bitterness and the hate in order to get to forgiveness. He was able to change himself enough to change the fate of his family, and even the fate of ancient Egypt and eventually, ancient Israel as well.
The idea that all we have to change is ourselves in order to change the world can seem trite. But it’s getting at a deeper reality that what we have the most control over in our lives is ourselves - how we respond to things, how we interact with others, how we live and move and be in the world. So if what we have the most control over is ourselves, and we work on ourselves to get our lives more in line with our values and beliefs, then that will have more of an impact on the world than trying to directly change things we have less control over.
Instead of constantly being on edge, worrying what comments others are going to make that’re hurtful and offensive, we can know the things that we’re going to say that’re going to bring love and compassion and empathy into the room. Instead of burying the difficult truths about our families and friends that everybody knows but nobody wants to admit, we can have the hard conversations so we can all move towards healing. And instead of getting overwhelmed by the chaos, poverty, and all that is broken in the world, we can take a deep breath and find a little crack in the world right near us that we can help to mend. Whether that’s making sure our neighbors have food to eat, or making sure they have clothes to wear, or advocating for them to receive justice when they have been wronged.
All of these actions won’t make drastic changes in the world overnight. True, lasting change happens slowly and can take generations to finally stick. But just because it can take a long time does not mean that it isn’t worth working towards, for yourself, your family, and your community.
So in your life right now, what is a cycle that you see that you want to work on breaking? Maybe it’s in your family or in your community, or maybe there are larger problems in the world manifesting in your corner of it. Then once you know, what are changes you can make or start making to ensure that the next generations don’t have to face the same problems we do now?
Because we all dream of a better world for our kids and our grandkids. And a crucial part of building that better world is putting to rest the things in the old one that are doing more harm than good.
Then, as Joseph’s brothers said, we can see what becomes of our dreams.