I’ve just returned from some holiday travel and it wasn’t too bad. I think I know who it was that gave me this cold, the guy sitting next to me on one leg of the journey. But all in all, not too bad. Planes were on time, and I had pretty good seats on most of my flights. I have sort of a love/hate relationship with traveling. I love traveling to spend time with family. I love to visit my old hometown and reconnect with old friends. But the whole adventure can be ruined if I don’t get an aisle seat. I hate sitting by the window, and if the middle seat is all that’s left, well I’d just rather not go. But if you can put me in the aisle seat in an exit row, I’m really happy. And if it’s an aisle seat in an exit row AND I have the whole exit row to myself… I might not get off the plane when we get there.
I never hear the story of Joseph from our gospel reading today without remembering the story of his predecessor in the Old Testament. These two most famous Josephs in the Bible are travelers -- and dreamers. We find the story of the first Joseph in Genesis. This Joseph is Jacob’s 11th son, and his father’s favorite. This Joseph has a prophetic dream, two in fact. And in each of the dreams Joseph sees himself enjoying the respect and admiration of his brothers and his father and mother. He sees them bowing down to him in homage, this 11th of 12 sons. But this Joseph makes two mistakes. He tells his brothers about his dreams, that’s his first mistake, and he seems to have a habit of sporting this Technicolor dreamcoat that they were already jealous of.
His envious older brothers first plot to kill him, but then decide to sell him to Midianite traders who in turn take Joseph into Egypt where he becomes a slave. But this Joseph is not just a dreamer but an interpreter of dreams -- and through his interpretations of the Pharaohs’ dreams, Joseph gains a high place in the Egyptian court. Years later during a famine back in Canaan, Joseph’s father Jacob and his family are threatened with starvation, but they hear that the famine has not reached as far as Egypt. So Jacob and his family travel down out of Canaan into Egypt to find food. And once in Egypt it is the now very prominent and very powerful Joseph who provides for them. They are reunited, they are safe from starvation, they come to respect the brother they have rejected, and they begin to live in safety and in prosperity. But I can only imagine what Joseph must have felt when he was bound and sold to the Midianite traders. What had happened to his dream? What had become of the vision in which his family respected and revered him? Joseph must have been full of despair and doubt. But God’s plan for Joseph was for reconciliation and for respect. Just as in his dreams, Joseph was destined to be reunited with his family and to be restored to a place of honor among those who had rejected him.
The New Testament Joseph that we hear about in today’s gospel has four dreams -- all in the first two chapters of the gospel of Matthew, and in these dreams, Joseph is given specific information about the child that his fiancé is to bear -- and where he must go and what he must do in order to protect this very special child. In the first dream, an angel tells Joseph not to break his engagement with Mary who is inexplicably pregnant, but rather to marry her, for her son is of the Holy Spirit and has come to save his people. Just after the child is born, Joseph again dreams and in this dream an angel warns him to take Mary and Jesus and flee to Egypt for Herod is searching for Jesus to do him harm. After some time in Egypt, Joseph again dreams and is told in this dream that Herod is dead and that it is safe to return home. Joseph is bound for home, but in yet another dream he is warned away from Judea and travels north into the kingdom of Israel, into Galilee and the town of Nazareth.Some archeological excavations at the site of the city of Sepphoris near Nazareth show just how wise a choice Joseph made. One of Herod’s sons and heirs has chosen Sepphoris to be his capital and had launched ambitious development plans for the city. There would have been plenty of work for carpenters. Joseph’s dreams led him to a place in which he and his family can be safe, and where he can earn a living to support them. They came home, they are safe, and they can begin to live in safety and with the hope sustenance.
Yet here too, I can only imagine what this Joseph must have felt on the flight into Egypt. Would it be safe for him and his family? Should he turn back? If he kept going, would it mean he would never return to Israel? Would the threat they were fleeing ever go away? But God’s will for this Joseph and his family was born out by his dreams. God led Joseph to safety and eventually to a place where he could provide for his family. All Joseph had to do was keep dreaming, and keep following those dreams.
In my previous career, I worked for the International Rescue Committee, a refugee relief agency headquartered here in New York. In 1999, I was on a plane -- in the aisle seat, luckily -- flying over the Sahara desert on my way to visit programs the IRC had established in Rwanda, Tanzania and Burundi to aid the refugees that had fled Rwanda five years earlier during the genocide that gripped that country and led to the brutal deaths of perhaps 1 million people. Next to me was a young woman who became quite frightened when we experienced turbulence over the desert. She asked me if she could hold my hand, and with each bump and rattle, she gripped it ever tighter. I tried talking to her in my very poor French and discovered that she was returning to Rwanda for the first time since fleeing when the genocide broke out. She had been living in Europe, having been transported there by missionaries. She had lived with a European family but had since learned that some of her blood family had survived the genocide and she was returning home to see them again.I wondered if her fear during the flight was based on the turbulence we were experiencing over the Sahara or the emotional turbulence she would undoubtedly experience upon return to a place in which so many of her loved ones had died -- where she would see other loved ones that she had once given up for dead.
While in Rwanda and later on another trip to Sierra Leone and Liberia, I met many refugees. Refugees are remarkable people. They are the survivors, the ones who run and hide and do whatever it takes on often desperate journeys to reach safety. And almost to a person, they dream of the day when they can return home. They dream of reuniting with their families and returning to their native lands. They dream of restoring the lives they once enjoyed before war, and famine, and genocide and ethnic violence became the deadly nightmares that destroyed their lives.
Human trafficking like that experienced by the Old Testament Joseph, and flight from violence, like that undertaken by the New Testament Joseph, are not artifacts of the ancient Biblical age -- they happen all the time in our world today. I could say a lot more about them but I won’t do that here. I’ve posted some links on our church website to some information on refugees and victims of trafficking for those of you who are interested. (Click here for info on IRC's refugee and anti-trafficking programs.)
Most of us have not had to flee for our lives in the face of genocide or advancing armies. Most of us have not been forced to immigrate to a strange country where we are then forced into a kind of slavery. For most of us, the worst travel mishaps we experience are not getting the aisle seat or picking up a cold in transit.
But we know what it’s like to want to protect our children from harm. We know what it’s like to want to provide them with a home and with all that they need in order to grow up to be who and what God intends them to be. And I expect many of us, if not most of us, know what it’s like to be estranged from someone we love, to be at a distance, either geographically or emotionally, from those who know us and love us or once loved us.
And some of us will know what it is like to be denied the respect and honor that is due to all human beings. Whether through sexism or racism or homophobia, or as a result of alcoholism or other dysfunctions in our families, some of us struggle with the wounds caused by living without the honor and respect due every child of God.
And our dreams are very similar to the dreams of many of the refugees that I have met, and of our two Josephs, to be restored, to be reunited, to be in community and in communion with those that we love, to be safe, and to be able to provide a good life free from harm and fear for our families, to be respected, to be honored and cherished.
In our reading from Jeremiah this morning, we hear God promise to fulfill these dreams of ours. God tells Jeremiah that he will gather his people from the farthest parts of the earth. All of us, the blind, the lame, those with children and those in labor -- with consolations he will lead us back. Our God will turn our mourning into joy and our sorrow into gladness. As the Psalmist puts it: Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs.
No matter where you are today: just setting off on your journey into Egypt, by choice or not by choice. Perhaps you can expect hardship there, or maybe you hope to find a place in which you and those you love can be safe, or maybe you have found that place, and are ready to begin the life that you have dreamt of.
Maybe you have experienced the pain of rejection by those who should have loved and protected you, maybe you are just beginning to journey to recovery, or maybe your dreams of reconciliation are coming true, and you are healing the rifts in your life, and being healed in return.
Wherever you may be on your journey, whatever dreams you have that are yet unfulfilled, my hope for you is that you keep going, keep putting one foot in front of another. Keep heading where your dreams lead you.
For our God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing. The God who has created us has wonderfully restored us and will continue to restore us. He has destined us to be his own. We are none other than very children of the living God who created us and who saves us. We will travel through tough times and rough terrain, that’s almost certain. But if we hold on to our dreams, to what we know to be God’s will for us, if we continue to seek to do what is God’s will, we will eventually get through the rough times and come to the place in which we can feel safe and respected and where we can prosper.
Such a place might be part of God’s plan for us in this life, but if not, it has most assuredly been promised to us in the life to come.
On World AIDS Day I was at St. Philip’s Church in Harlem, and when the preacher said, “God don’t bring you to it,” the congregation completed his sentence for him; “unless God gonna bring you through it.”
I’ll bet you our two Josephs would say the same thing.
Keep dreaming, and keep travelling -- forward to the place God has prepared for you.
+Amen.
© The Rev. Mark R. Collins
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