All the Feelings: Joseph and His Brothers

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This morning, we catch up with Joseph already 39 years into his story. Let me see if I can catch up on the first four decades of his life in, you know, two minutes…

• Joseph was born into a big family. He had a lot of brothers, but their father favored him above all of the rest. In fact, when he was young, Joseph had dreams about how special he was, and how his whole family would one day bow down to him.

• You could imagine how much his brothers loved all of this, including him telling them all about his dreams! Their resentment grew and grew until one day they actually sold him into slavery to some passing merchants, and assumed that they would never see him again.

• Joseph’s journey in slavery took him to Egypt, where his life for a long time was basically one step forward, followed by two steps back:
  • He was employed by a nobleman named Potiphar, but Potiphar’s wife falsely accused him of making advances on her and Joseph was thrown in jail.
  • While in jail, he helped a fellow cellmate that had the power to help him when he got out, but when he did get out, he promptly forgot all about Joseph.
  • You could imagine how many nights he tossed and turned, filled with resentment toward his brothers and their violence to him.

Eventually, his cellmate remembered Joseph and his ability to interpret dreams, and recommended him to none other than the Pharoah himself, who valued his input so much that he put him in charge of the entire nation’s food program. People came from all around the region to buy food from Egypt’s surplus. He was finally free of his brothers and their impact on him! But then his past came crashing back into his life:

• One day, Joseph saw, waiting in line for food, all of his brothers! They didn’t recognize him, but he immediately knew exactly who they were.

• Still angry about the way that they treated him, Joseph uses his power and their inability to recognize him. He manipulates him into bringing his younger brother so that he could meet him, and he frames them for theft.

• Remembering how they were jerks to him, he in turn acts like a jerk to them. The text describes an emotional roller coaster, working to hide his feelings from them and perhaps from himself, the tension building every time he talks to them. They have no idea why this Egyptian official seems to be picking on them, until this happens in Chapter 45…

Genesis 45.1–15

¹ Then Joseph could no longer control himself before all those who stood by him, and he cried out, “Send everyone away from me.” So no one stayed with him when Joseph made himself known to his brothers. ² And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it. ³ Joseph said to his brothers, “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?” But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence.

⁴ Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Come closer to me.” And they came closer. He said, “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. ⁵ And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life. ⁶ For the famine has been in the land these two years, and there are five more years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest. ⁷ God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to keep alive for you many survivors. ⁸ So it was not you who sent me here but God; he has made me a father to Pharaoh and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. ⁹ Hurry and go up to my father and say to him, ‘Thus says your son Joseph, God has made me lord of all Egypt; come down to me; do not delay. ¹⁰ You shall settle in the land of Goshen, and you shall be near me, you and your children and your children’s children, as well as your flocks, your herds, and all that you have. ¹¹ I will provide for you there, since there are five more years of famine to come, so that you and your household and all that you have will not come to poverty.’ ¹² And now your eyes and the eyes of my brother Benjamin see that it is my own mouth that speaks to you. ¹³ You must tell my father how greatly I am honored in Egypt and all that you have seen. Hurry and bring my father down here.” ¹⁴ Then he fell upon his brother Benjamin’s neck and wept, while Benjamin wept upon his neck. ¹⁵ And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them, and after that his brothers talked with him.

Robert Plutchik was a psychologist who studied human emotions, and in the 1980s he theorized that we are capable of 34,000 different emotions. That’s…a lot of feelings.

As recently as 2017, psychologists at Cal Berkley narrowed that number down to 27 distinct emotional categories, including adoration, boredom, empathic pain, nostalgia, romance, and surprise. Not 34,000, but still a lot of feelings.

When I was in seminary, my uncle Wade Rowatt, a pastoral counselor who worked a lot with mental health in youth, invited me to co-lead the group with him. With these teenagers, who we were helping to name and understand their emotions, he simplified them to four: mad, sad, glad, and afraid. I still use this rather helpful simplification at times, including when I talk to couples in premarital counseling about the emotions that we feel and how we express them.

Some of you might notice that these four are not too different from the emotions characterized in the Pixar movie from 2015: Inside Out. From left to right in the picture are Anger, Disgust, Joy, Fear, and Sadness. Not far from “mad, sad, glad, and afraid.” The movie has been hailed a masterpiece by psychologists and therapists because it invites conversation about our emotions in ways that many of us struggle with: kids, teenagers, and—let’s be honest—a lot of us as adults are still trying to figure out our emotions, and how to express them in healthy ways!

Complicating this work is that we tend to get some really unhealthy messages from the culture around us. That’s part of why I spend so much time in premarital counseling talking about “mad, sad, glad, and afraid.” Because we end up with all of these messages about what emotions are OK, and which ones are not OK:

• Some of those messages are tied to gender. It is OK for men to be glad, or even mad, but they are looked at suspiciously if they are sad or afraid. Women can be sad, but not angry…compare the way that we talk about politicians: an angry man is passionate, but an angry woman is shrill and needs to calm down.

• There are messages tied to our families of origin. Maybe in your family, it was OK to be happy, but not really allowed to be sad…or angry. Or in some families, sadness is just reality, but if you are too happy, you are considered too “Pollyanna” and out of touch. For some of us, happy is not OK.

• There are even messages tied to our faith. Has anyone ever heard the message in church that we should be joyful, but if we are too sad then we probably need to pray more? But ironically, we also get these messages about gladness…it is good to be joyful, but experiencing too much pleasure is suspect. If you are having too much fun, you probably aren’t being a good Christian.

This month, Pastor Cristina and I are going to be taking turns preaching about some of these themes. The goal of the series is to think about emotions in the context of faith, in the context of the Church, even in the context of the Bible. We hope to be able to deconstruct some of those unhealthy, culturally-assigned messages about what feelings are good and acceptable, and maybe even start to reconstruct what might be a healthier way to talk about our feelings and why that might be a good and faithful and even holy thing.

Let’s start with today’s text as an example. Joseph’s story is full of emotions! If you are like me, you have heard a sermon or two in your day about which of Joseph’s emotions are considered good or acceptable, and which ones are bad or unholy: “If only Joseph had stopped being mad and just been happy, everything would have turned out just fine!” But what if instead we read Joseph as someone who struggled to identify and deal with his emotions. Instead of embracing and working to understand them, he shut them down. Look again through the lens of “mad, sad, glad, and afraid.”

• Joseph had a lot of anger toward his brothers. As he should! They sold him into slavery, stole his coat, put animal blood on it, and told his father that he had been killed. For most of the rest of his life, their actions caused him incredible pain. He should be angry! But instead of acknowledging that anger, through most of the story, Joseph channeled it as revenge, making them twist in the wind, torturing them the way that they tortured him.

• He had a lot of sadness, in particular the grief over never being able to be a big brother to Benjamin. He grieved the years that were lost with his family, and with his brothers, and especially the brother that he never knew. But instead of acknowledging and dealing with that sadness, it became another reason for him to manipulate his brothers, forcing them to bring Benjamin to him, and then framing them for a crime that they didn’t commit, just so that he could keep him closer a bit longer.

• Joseph had reason to be joyful when he first saw his brothers. Could you imagine how many times over the years he would have longed to see his family again? To talk to his brothers? To embrace his father again? But instead of dealing with the complexity and vulnerability of that joy, he chose to put on a mask…the mask of an Egyptian official who doesn’t know them. In the story, he won’t even eat with them. Instead of embracing the joy that he might have felt, he chooses instead to don the mask of the culture around him. He allows the dominant culture to tell him what to feel and what not to feel, like our messages about gender, or from our family of origin, or assigned by our faith communities.

• Joseph was mad, sad, glad, and he was afraid. Imagine the fear that he felt. The fear of vulnerability to let his brothers in again. The fear of cultural judgment: what would happen if he, the powerful Egyptian official, were to acknowledge that these poor saps coming to beg in the bread line once were his superiors. Once bossed him around and threw him in a pit. Once broke him.

One of the images of the movie Inside Out is that the main character—Riley—has in her brain a control board. All five of her emotions work the buttons on the control board, and when there is an emotionally ambiguous moment in Riley’s life, all of the emotions are fighting over the board, pushing buttons and turning dials. There is yelling and fighting and chaos and confusion. I kind of see this scene in Genesis in a similar way. I imagine Joseph calmly standing before his brothers, while underneath his emotions are all fighting for control. I imagine a Joseph-shaped Anger, Sadness, Joy, and Fear battling it out. But then, a fascinating thing happens. Joseph lets the inside…out.

Joseph cannot hold back his emotions anymore. He reveals the truth to his brothers. “I am Joseph, your brother.” Joseph acknowledges his pain, his emotion. He weeps in front of his brothers and reveals his identity, loudly enough that the Egyptians heard it in the next room and the gossip train began. He lets out his sadness, and his anger, and blubbers all over himself with joy that they are going to come live with him in Egypt and he will take care of them.

This scene is one of the most powerfully emotional stories in Scripture. And thus has become one of the most popular in history. Because we get it. This is a human story. We get Joseph’s pain. And his relief. And his hope for restoration. And his anger and resentment. And we get that all of that comes at once. We get it because our control boards have been just as chaotic in our lives. Joseph’s story is our story.

It is a human story, but it is also God’s story. If you hear one thing from us this month, I hope it is this message: all emotions are created by God. There are not GOOD emotions and BAD emotions. There are emotions. There are not feelings that we SHOULD feel and others that we SHOULD NOT feel. There are feelings. In fact, I would argue that the story of Scripture is that we worship a God who feels. A God who is mad, sad, glad, and even afraid. Walk with me through the pages of Scripture.

• God gets mad. When God’s people rebel or do things that end up hurting themselves. When they reject God or God’s ways, he gets angry.

• God gets sad. Scripture tells us that God grieves when we reject him like a parent rejected by a rebellious teenager.

• God gets glad. The Bible talks about the joy of the Lord. Genesis tells us that God created and called it good. The Hebrew word that is used over and over again in Genesis is menuha, the delight of God.

• And at times in Scripture, God is afraid. “Take this cup from me,” prayed Jesus. In the Garden of Gethsemine, facing a violent and painful death, God was scared. And if that feels theologically inappropriate, or impossible or somehow limiting the sovereignty of God…boy, do I have a sermon series for you! That is our goal in this series, to help uncover the fact that we feel afraid because God has created us in God’s own image. In the image of a God who has been afraid. Who has been sad. Who has been glad. Who has been mad. And 34,000 other emotions. When we fully feel and acknowledge our emotions and work through them, we are doing holy work.

The story of Joseph, and the whole story of Scripture, is a story of a God who feels, and who creates humans who feel.

In the movie, Riley comes of age when she acknowledges that all of her feelings matter. It is OK to be sad, as well as happy. It is OK to be afraid. Angry. Disgusted. Even at the same time. Joseph’s story is similar. He will reconcile with his family, but it doesn’t happen magically, or even immediately. We are only about half-way through his story by the end of Chapter 45. There is still more work to be done. But Joseph begins this journey toward healing, toward acknowledging that God has been with him the whole time. In the anger. In the sadness. In the fear. And in the joy. May we join that journey today, as well.