SERMON FOR THE 9TH AUGUST 2026
Matthew chapter 13 verses 22-33 and Genesis 37:1-4,12-28 When Dreams Become Nightmares
Today’s readings have a theme running through them of faith and trust. In Matthew chapter 14, Jesus walks on the water and it is Peter who jumps out of the boat to try to walk to Jesus. In doing so, he starts to walk to Jesus and then becomes distracted by the stormy sea. Peter starts to sink and Jesus pulls him up just before he starts to sink further.
In preaching terms, this is an account of keeping faith in Christ – especially when storms and difficulties seem to surround us at some stage or other in life. Do we trust that God will still be with us in these times?
In Jewish understanding in the Torah, the sea and storms represented the struggle between good and evil in the Creation and if this is applied in the Gospel text, then Jesus is Sovereign over nature and quells and overcomes these forces. It is a scholarly interpretation and one that is helpful, though don’t let it detract that the miraculous did occur on that early morning with Peter and how Jesus can be found in the middle of people’s distress.
I love it how science always seems to have an answer for everything and scientists deduce that ice pathways can form near the shore of Galilee early in the morning when it is really cold. These ice pathways sit just under the sea’s surface. This interpretation reminds of Michael Flately of River dance fame doing his clicky shoes dance on stage with a pathway made just under the water he danced on. The whole idea was to make it look like Michael Flately being so amazing in his dance that literally danced over the surface of water. Interestingly, Taoism relates the mastery of self-control leading to being able to walk on the surface of water also.
I have probably exhausted this thinking and personally I think that something miraculous did occur with Jesus and Peter and there is a truth that faith and the Sovereignty of God does lead in the pathway of quelling the fears we meet in life and the fears within ourselves
Having said all this, I am drawn to the Old Testament text today found in Genesis chapter 37 passage where we find Joseph and his amazing technicolour coat and a story that speaks about real faith in deeply traumatic experiences for the young Joseph.
The background
Joseph is the favoured son of many sons of Jacob. Recall that Joseph is the 11th son born to Jacob, but the first son of Jacob’s favourite (and now deceased) wife Rachel. Joseph is the golden child, his father’s favourite.
God is at work in Joseph and somehow Jacob finds a close infinity to his own faith journey in the teenager Joseph.
So, Joseph, being seventeen years old, was pasturing the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives. We hear how Jacob loved Joseph more than any other of his sons and he made him a robe of many colours. All his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peacefully to him.”
“Now Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers they hated him even more. He said to them, “Hear this dream that I have dreamed: Behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright. And behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf.” His brothers said to him, “Are you indeed to reign over us? Or are you indeed to rule over us?” So, they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words.”
O.K. or as Jim Carey would say, Alll …. Righty. Joseph is seen as an upstart and arrogant. Joseph gets to stay around home while his brothers do the hard work in the fields.
In the scene in Genesis Chapter 37, Jacob asks Joseph to go to his brothers in Dothan as he is worried that they have been gone a long while. This is not a short trip. It is about 80 kms and Joseph sets out.
Joseph has to ask directions of strangers and eventually tracks down his brothers. Are they glad to see Joseph? No. Though this beggars belief, they plot to kill him. After a while this changes to let’s throw him down a pit or silo that they used in those days – about 15 ft deep and 10 feet wide. These were used to store grain or keep a trouble maker or as a toilet in some instances and sometimes for water storage. So, they throw Joseph into the pit with no food or water.
We can feel Joseph’s sense of prestige and entitlement giving way to his confusion as his brothers attack him. We can feel his panic at the bottom of a pit and the scream with him for help. We can feel his emotional and spiritual shock as he is snatched by distant relatives and hauled away as a human slave waiting to be bought and sold to God-only-knows-who else.
The brothers decide to have their lunch with Joseph listening in the pit as they scheme. Eventually they come up with a plan to sell Joseph into slavery to a passing Ishmaelites and get twenty pieces of silver for him. The brothers concoct a plan to tell Jacob that Joseph had been killed by a ferocious lion and the favoured coat remnant steeping in blood from one of the animals the brother slaughtered.
The only brother with a consciousness is Reuben who thinks that Joseph will have been taught a lesson by being put down a pit. So, Reuben returns to the pit to find it is too late and Joseph has been taken by the Midianite traders who are now on their way to Egypt. The brothers go back to Jacob and tell the terrible news of Joseph’s death and watch Jacob suffer in deep grief knowing that Joseph is alive. Joseph, meanwhile is brought to Egypt and sold as a slave to Potiphar, an officer of high rank to the Pharoah. I
If we can imagine this is a family today, where all the brothers turn on the seventeen-year old and talk of killing him. This is not a dream, so much as a nightmare. For anyone thrown out of home as a teenager today, there is an identification with Joseph in the Bible. In Joseph’s case, betrayal, deceit, violence, ghosting, where do you go from there?
Rejection in life.
Rejection is a brutal experience, particularly when you thought you were needed and included… when you never saw it coming. Rejection is especially painful when it comes from people you thought loved you, cared about you.
Rejection is part of life – from childhood experiences like not being picked for the team, to teenage and young adults love, romance, crushes, rejection. Then adulthood and job rejections and things not working out in life. These are painful and part of life, though Joseph’s story is more than just rejection and more about abandonment, alienation and is some ways annihilation. Joseph is remarkable in this resilience.
It is a very different story to Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour dream coat where Joseph sings, “Any dream will do…”.
The song in the musical reflects that Joseph somehow will know what lies ahead and the dreams were always going to end in fortune. However, Joseph doesn’t know what is ahead and if we want to see what real faith and trust in God looks like, the young Joseph who claimed the Sovereignty of God shows us what that looks like. The musical, if you’ve seen it, is about dreamers who follow their dreams, while the real story, is about a God who oversees and superintends all of history.
It’s called God’s providence. Later in Genesis 50:20 it says Joseph says– “As for you,” he says to his brothers, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.”
We might be tempted to think that God reacted like a brilliant cosmic chess player, was able to checkmate your evil plans and turn it for good, but it’s much more all-encompassing than that.
Joseph says, “You meant that for evil, and at the same time that you were meaning it for evil, God was meaning the very same activity for good. Namely, that He would save his people from famine and He would constitute them a nation in Egypt. At the same time had good purposes.
Consequences of evil
We think and do sometimes see and hear of massive dysfunction in families, though don’t expect to hear this in Biblical families.
In Joseph’s case, we as the reader are left wondering if the brothers have second thoughts and how is their consciousness as they watch their father fall apart. Yet, they seem to be getting along famously. We sometimes see this on social media where alienation or more like annihilation of people in the family and this trumpeted as deserved victory and they had it coming to them anyhow. Safety in numbers like 10 brothers and one Joseph. Yes, Joseph is an upstart, though a lot of teenage boys can be finding their identity.
We think all is well until we understand that Reuben had to live with his change of heart over Jospeh and the consequence of actions going too far. We also hear that he had to keep the truth from his father because he had been with one of his father’s concubines and couldn’t bring himself to tell his father. We know that the brothers watch on at their broken father knowing the real truth. We see in social media the families that there is safety in numbers though this can be because if one of the family members has a change of heart, they are afraid to break ranks with the other family members in case the same fate lies in store for them.
If nothing else, this story shows is the messiness of evil and the entertaining of evil intention is not without consequences. People do get way with it and in doing so they lose part of what we might term their innocence and soul.
So what might help?
Number one – God’s sovereign and Mighty and true.
God is and always will be in control in this world even when all else seems to crumble around us. Joseph did not give up on God. Almost all Christians believe in a general sense God is in charge. In the story Joseph’s silly dreams are undermined, yet at that very moment God was setting in motion God’s plan. One thing we see in Joseph is his trust in God when nothing made any sense and all seemed victory to the people who used force and hatred and violence. God did not abandon Joseph in the pit and although not told what Joseph truly felt at the time, we know that Joseph remains open to the Sovereignty and power of God.
The story tells us that evil is a reality in life and seem to win in many ways and we can forget that God is powerful and Mighty than we can fully understand. God’s truth is more powerful.
The second – the story didn’t end in the pit but a robe in Egypt.
We know what happened, though Joseph didn’t know the end of the story at this point.
Many of us field various challenges in our lives our lives and we don’t know the end, like Joseph when you’re right in the middle of the story. But you do know, and hope and we work and do what we can to make better outcomes. This Joseph sis and of big importance, Joseph stayed true to God and the unfolding faithfulness of God.
Thirdly, the saints of the Bible looked like stories of defeat, though were stories of God’s truth prevailing.
The story of Jesus is bringing good into the world and then finding brutal rejection to silence Jesus that ended on the cross looked like a failure. Though, as we know the cross did not finish Jesus and the resurrection is the story of victory.
We might say that not all stories end that way. What if Jesus hadn’t shown what God’s love looks like, what God’s Kingdom is. What if the Biblical characters had said nothing in the face of destructive ways.
When we look at Joseph’s story, he had every right later in his story when the shoe was on the other foot to destroy his brothers and he chose not to.
The story of Joseph tells us that wrong doing does happen and often succeeds, though God’s truth is more powerful and God’s providence is not to be underestimated.
Some see the resurrection story as something for the next life when it isn’t all about that. It is how we have a choice to live in the ways of God or not when faced with evil and injustice. What we see in Joseph is that he chose God’s providence rather than the destructive path. Jesus, in the resurrection encourages us to not hate and seek good because God is truth and God is more powerful than we dare to understand.
The beauty of God’s providence
Not every dream will do. But God’s plans always come true, and that is the hope for all of God’s people.
When you feel rejected by family or friends, know that God is still with you. When you lose your social status or prized possessions, know that God is still with you. When your wellbeing is threatened by others, know that God is still with you.
When your life dramatically changes from what you had expected or hoped for, know that God is still with you. God’s arms are always reaching out to us and how God is working in and through us.
References
Our Pastor’s Blog Susanville United Methodist Church Weekly Messages Rejected but not Abandoned – Genesis 37:1-28 and Clearly Reformed, a sermon entitled ‘When dreams become nightmares”.