Potiphar's Wife's Lies

"Joseph Accused by Potiphar's Wife," Rembrandt

NOTE: THE SECOND SEGMENT OF THE SERMON IS OMITTED FROM BOTH THE WRITTEN AND AUDIO VERSIONS OF THE SERMON. THIS IS BECAUSE A TRUE STORY WAS TOLD IN DETAIL ABOUT A REAL CHURCH AND AND REAL MINISTER WHO FALSELY ACCUSED THE SENIOR MINISTER OF HAVING A SEXUAL AFFAIR WITH ANOTHER MEMBER OF THE CHURCH STAFF. THE DISTINGUISHED MINISTER WAS TERMINATED AND HUMILIATED IN THE PROCESS; THERE WAS NO COMPELLING EVIDENCE THAT HE WAS GUILTY. STILL, FALSE ACCUSATIONS WON THE DAY. HIS SPIRIT WAS BROKEN; HE DIED WITHIN A COUPLE OF YEARS OF HIS TERMINATION. HE WAS ONLY 59 YEARS OLD WHEN HE DIED. THE FALSE ACCUSATIONS SURELY HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH ROBBING HIM OF YEARS HE, OTHERWISE, MIGHT HAVE LIVED TO ENJOY.

I.

One of several compelling arguments against the death penalty is the number of people who have been proven innocent long after they were executed and the number of people who served hard time for a long time on death row and who were exonerated just before being legally put to death. Though our Wednesday evening discussion leader last week, the new president of the Delaware chapter of the ACLU, Kathleen MacRae, dealt with the status of the death penalty in several states in our country, she did not go into the statistics I want to share with you now. Our concern today is with false accusations.

For years, there were numerous cases of people being put to death on the basis of weak evidence and/or poor legal representation. Things changed to some degree with the development of tools to study DNA evidence.

Brothers Thomas and Meeks Griffin, African American farmers in South Carolina, were executed in 1915 for the murder of a man said to have been involved in an interracial affair two years earlier; they were pardoned 94 years after execution. Legal scholars now believe they were arrested and charged because they were not wealthy enough or informed enough to hire competent legal counsel and get an acquittal.

In Florida, Jesse Tafero was convicted as was an accomplice, Sonia Jacobs, of murdering two police officers in 1976. The accusation was that they killed the two officers who were trying to apprehend them while they were on the run because of drug charges. Both Tafero and Jacobs were sentenced to death based partially on the testimony of a third person, Walter Rhodes, a fellow prisoner of Tafero’s who happened to be an accessory to the crime testifying against the other two in exchange for a lighter sentence. Sonia Jacobs’s death sentence was commuted in 1981. In 1982, Rhodes recanted his testimony and claimed full responsibility for the crime. Despite Rhodes’s confession, Tafero was executed in 1990. In 1992 the conviction against Jacobs was ruled worthless, and Florida did not have enough evidence to retry her. She then entered a so called Alfred plea and was sentenced to time served. The same evidence was used against Tafero as against Jacobs, so Tafero would have also been released had he not already been executed.

Some say Wayne Felker was a convicted rapist; others say he was not a rapist at all, but was another innocent victim of execution. Felker was a suspect in the disappearance of a Georgia woman in 1981 and was under police surveillance for two weeks prior to the discovery of her body. An autopsy was conducted by an unqualified technician; how that could have happened I don’t know, but the results were presented in such a way as to show that the woman’s death occurred before the surveillance got underway. After Felker's conviction, his lawyers presented testimony by forensics experts that the body could not have been dead more than three days when found well into the two week surveillance period; a whole stack of evidence was found at that point, which had been intentionally hidden by the prosecution so as not to have been presented in court. Part of the hidden evidence was a DNA report that may very well have exonerated Felker or at least have cast doubt on his conviction. There was also a signed confession by another suspect in the paperwork. Despite all this, DNA and a signed confession notwithstanding, Felker was executed in 1996. Four years later, his case was reopened in an effort to make him the first executed person in the US to have DNA testing used to prove innocence after execution. The attempt failed, but only because the DNA report was ruled inconclusive as a factor in determining innocence or guilt.

Getting closer and closer to the present, Cameron Willingham was executed in Texas in 2004; he was charged with setting a 1991 fire that killed his three little girls. Since then, suspicions have been raised about the reliability of the forensic evidence that strongly supported his conviction.

After-the-fact DNA studies have allowed overturned sentences and the release of more than 15 death row inmates since 1992 in the United States. Unfortunately, DNA evidence has only been available for analysis in a small number of capital cases. The realities of false accusation and wrongful imprisonment have had opponents of the death penalty pushing for reevaluation of case after case. Of course, you don’t have to oppose the death penalty to oppose wrongful execution of innocent citizens. In any case, the stir has led to the release of other prisoners with DNA out of the picture because of very weak cases against them and prosecutorial misconduct; the results have ranged from acquittal at retrial to the formal dropping of charges to purely innocence-based pardons. The Death Penalty Information Center publishes a list of 8 inmates who have been executed though they probably were innocent. There’s another list of 39 executions carried out in the U.S., and all of my figures today are based on U.S. cases exclusively, in the face of serious doubt about guilt. If there is serious doubt about guilt, how can governors and the Supreme Court tell the executioners to get on with the job?

A man by the name of Kirk Bloodsworth was the first American to be freed from death row as a result of exoneration by DNA fingerprinting. Ray Krone is the 100th American to have been sentenced to death and later exonerated because of new evidence or a more thorough study of existing evidence.

While these chilling facts give us pause, our concern today is not with the death penalty per se--though that is something spirituality communities need to ponder with frequency; our focus today, again, is on the life-stealing power of false accusations, the life-stealing power of false accusations. Sometimes “life-stealing” means taking away someone’s ability to enjoy life; sometimes it means executing her or him. We’re supposed to operate in this country on a principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” and that may be accomplished to some degree most of the time or much of the time. We all know, though, that often the accusation alone is functionally a guilty verdict.

In my teen years, the comedy actor, Vickie Lawrence, then associated with the immensely famous Carol Burnett Show, released her one and only hit song. All kids in my age range knew the words and could sing them right along with Vickie any time the song was played. “That’s the Night that the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” Actually, I’m not sure that they’ve ever come back on in some places around that state, but that’s for another sermon. Some great Americans have been born and bred there nonetheless.

Back to Vickie Lawrence’s haunting song that caught the ears and the imaginations of kids who knew what life in a small Southern town was like:

He was on his way home from Candletop,

Been two weeks gone, and he'd thought he'd stop,

At Web's and have him a drink 'fore he went home to her.

Andy Warlord said: "Hello."

He said, "How. What's doin'?"

Wo said: "Sit down, I got some bad news and it's gonna hurt."

He said: "I'm your best friend, and you know that's right,

But your young bride ain't home tonight.

Since you been gone, she's been seeing that Amos boy, Seth."

Now he got mad, and he saw red.

Andy said: "Boy, don't you lose your head,

'Cos to tell you the truth, I've been with her myself."

Well Andy got scared, and left the bar,

Walkin' on home, 'cos he didn't live far.

You see, Andy didn't have many friends,

And he just lost him one.

Brother thought his wife musta left town,

So he went home and finally found,

The only thing Papa had left him and that was a gun.

He went off to Andy's house,

Slippin' through the back woods quiet as a mouse.

Came upon some tracks too small for Andy to make.

He looked through the screen at the back porch door,

And he saw Andy lyin on the floor,

In a puddle of blood, and he started to shake.

Georgia patrol was making their rounds,

So he fired a shot just to flag them down.

A big-bellied sherriff grabbed his gun and said, "Why'd you do it?"

Judge said guilty on a make-believe trial,

Slapped the sherriff on the back with a smile,

And said: "Supper's waitin' at home, and I gotta get to it."

Well, they hung my brother before I could say,

The tracks he saw while on his way,

To Andy's house and back that night were mine.

And his cheatin' wife had never left town,

That's one body that'll never be found.

You see, little sister don't miss when she aims her gun.

That's the night that the lights went out in Georgia.

That's the night that they hung an innocent man.

Well, don't trust your soul to no backwoods, southern lawyer.

'Cos the judge in the town's got blood stains on his hands.

III.

When last we encountered Joseph, his brothers had sold him to some slavetraders, but led his father, Jacob, to believe that wild animals had killed him, ripping him to shreds in the process. The slavetraders did what slavetraders do; they sold Joseph as a slave in Egypt, and he ended up as a servant in the household of one of the higher-up Egyptian political officials named Potiphar. Potiphar had a very important job, as it turned out. He was the captain of the palace guard; in reality the Pharaoh’s life was in his hands. Naturally, the Pharaoh relied heavily on him and trusted Potiphar completely.

Back at home, Joseph was such the model servant; Potiphar promoted him all the way up to head of the household staff, and Potiphar’s instincts had been right on target. Never had his household functioned so well.

To his disadvantage in that context, Joseph was majorly good looking, a young hottie in the house day after day after day with Potiphar’s wife while Potiphar was working long hours over at the palace. Long hours went with the job; he knew it, and so did everyone else.

Potiphar’s wife was a Cougar, and Joseph was her intended prey. She was love starved. Potiphar had little time for her even when he was at home, and the physical part of their relationship had long since been less than ideal. He may well have had other wives and concubines to further complicate the life of his sex-starved wife.

The Hebrew Bible doesn’t give Mrs. Potiphar’s name, but a medieval Torah scholar gives her name as Zuleikha. A Persian poet, Jani, in his poem, “Yusuf and Zulaikha,” obviously knows her name but spells it slightly differently than did the Torah scholar I’ve just mentioned. In Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical about Joseph, Potiphar’s wife isn’t named, but is called Mrs. Potiphar, and some of the singers happen to mention that she was a man eater!

Well, you see and sense the situation we’re in here. We only know bits and pieces of what was obviously a very complex story. For example, was Joseph always 100% professional in his dealings with Zuleikha, or did he enjoy the attention and carry on some flirtation? Did he lead the Cougar on?

I’ve been slow to understand what a Cougar is. I know there is or was a television show that had something to do with Cougars, and I’m not talking about Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom.” Beyond that, I was rather oblivious to the increasing interest in our culture of middle aged and older women with younger men and visa versa. I got it more clearly when Carson, my younger son, and I met for dinner at Kid Shaleen’s. Carson interrupted one part of our conversation and said, “Excuse me for interrupting, Dad, but I forgot to tell you that Thursday nights at Kid’s is unofficially Cougar Night so if you see lots of middle aged and older women and a smattering of young guys, mostly gigolos, you’ll understand what’s going on.” Well, sure enough, by the time we left, I was the only male patron over the age of 30 dining or drinking there, and some of the clients kept looking at me with disdain, as if they were waiting for me to get out of the way so they could try their luck with Carson. Many of you know about his struggles to find employment in this economy and his recent decision to try his luck in Baltimore where he is moving, now, in less than two weeks. Anyway, I told him long ago that the solution to his financial problems was a wealthy middle aged woman. Of course, any of you who know me know that I’m joking; if you don’t realize immediately that I’m joking about that, we need to have coffee right away, but not at Kid Shaleen’s on a Thursday night.

OK, so Joseph had been brought up to follow the rules, and he had delighted his father in doing so. Though we have to leave the door open to some possible flirtation on his part, chances are he didn’t flirt with his boss’s wife though he certainly would have been courteous and attentive to her. Given her emotionally and physically deprived state of being, she may well have taken that to be flirtation.

One day, she tells Joseph outright that it’s time to stop playing games and time to get down to serious business; the time for sweaty sex is long overdue, she said. Several artists paint Zuleikha in various stages of disrobing; many of them have her bare breasted by the time she get real. One Dutch artist who didn’t think as highly of Joseph’s virtue as I do, has sketched Zuleikha bare breasted and Joseph naked but on the run away from her. In other words, according to the perspective of that art piece, Joseph gave her every reason to think he was just as interested as she was.

Joseph tells her he will not be able to participate. She doesn’t take no for an answer; she tries to lure Joseph into a sexual encounter day after day. One day when she really turns up the heat, he runs away from her, and she grabs at him to slow him down; he gets away, but she did have a piece of his clothing in her hand. A woman scorned.

Well, she wasn’t going to take that rejection lying down, no pun intended; she screamed out for help from other members of the household staff. They ran to her side, and she told them what had happened, her false accusation; she held Joseph’s garment or part of his garment in her hand--whatever she’d been able to grab hold of--which gave credence to her tale. The minute her husband came home from a hard day’s work at Pharaoh’s palace, she told him Joseph tried to rape her; she had resisted him, she said, and he had run away. This is just what one would expect from a Hebrew she told Potiphar, more or less laying the blame for the incident on him.

He had Joseph found and immediately cast into the palace prison were the pharaoh’s most serious enemies were kept. One New Testament scholar points out that the prevailing law would have called for the death penalty as the proper punishment for attempted rape. This scholar suspects that Potiphar couldn’t swallow his wife’s tale hook, line, and sinker so he imprisoned the man he had trusted with his life and his wife, but he didn’t have him put to death. He had to allow his wife to save face. Her lies easily could have gotten Joseph killed; that was of no concern to her. Only her wounded pride and her unattended sexual desires mattered to her. What’s the value of a Hebrew slave’s life anyway?

If you’ve read Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” which isn’t funny at all, when the fictional Dante takes his tour of hell he sees Potiphar’s wife. She is given no opportunity to speak by the writer, but another resident of hell tells Dante that with all other perjurers, she has been condemned to suffer a burning fever for all of eternity. Remember, Dante was writing fiction, not a theological treatise. He is not encouraging his readers to believe in a literal hell. He is with symbols slamming all of those in history who have told lies, especially false accusations about innocent others--costing these innocents embarrassment, humiliation, job losses, and, yes, costing many of them their lives. Lies can kill.

Peter's Lies about Jesus

I.

I wonder if any of you have ever had to live any part of your life lying about who you really are or what you really believe, in order to live without condemnation, verbal abuse, or threats to your well-being? I hope you haven’t, but there are and always have been, in places, those who have had to lie about their core, their essence, in order to survive.

The first thing that comes to my mind is the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy that existed many years, now rejected though not yet put fully into practice by the military as a whole, or even many parts of the military. Officially, though, it has been determined to be diminishing not only of the rights, but also of the human dignity, of many who have served and are presently serving our country--protecting us and our treasured rights. Perhaps there were and are plenty of gay and lesbian citizens of our country who are relieved not to have to live among others while having to pretend to be who they aren’t and can’t be. There are those, however, who want to demonstrate their patriotism by serving in the military--not all desiring to fight in wars, but plenty hoping to influence the military from within toward world peace.

Yet, many gays and lesbians--brave, selfless, heroines and heroes--have been tossed because of their sexuality, a fact of their birth, something over which they have no more control than the color of their skin. Those who have put their lives on the line for the rest of us, dishonorably discharged, benefits stripped away. medals reclaimed, humiliated to the best of the military’s ability to bring about. Why? Because of a secret discovered, sexuality in the darkness comes to light. Nothing more.

Now, how the military lasted for so long with “straight” personnel having gay flings I don’t know, but, while frowned upon, that was never taken to be the kind of offense as wrong as owning one’s sexuality, saying out loud for anyone who needed to know, “I am lesbian. I am gay.”

Gays and lesbians who never join the military often have much more painful and complicated battles to fight than their military counterparts. I’m talking about coming out to their families.

Add to my personal knowledge of the problems related to coming out, I watched, and I think our Wednesday even crew watched it too, a documentary titled, “For the Bible Tells Me So.” In this film, we meet five essentially fundamentalist families who have a homosexual child. We see the best and the worst ways religiously conservative families respond to a child’s daring to say, “I’m gay,” or, “I’m a lesbian.” The family of former Congressperson Richard Gephardt get all gold stars on their report card because of how much they love their daughter no matter what; they believe their conservative religion teaches them the predominant lesson of loving others, and if you loved others in general, wouldn’t those in your own home especially benefit from such love? That’s how the Gephardts did it. In contrast, one fundamentalist mother preached to her lesbian daughter, “You must repent in order to be the person God intends for you to be.” There was a rift in their relationship. They saw little of each other, and only exchanged an occasional letter. When the mother wrote, she always or almost always, put in her pitch for heterosexuality as a necessity for anyone who desired to be loved by God. One day, this mother got the news that her daughter had killed herself, at least in part, because she could never say who she was to her mother and have that be acceptable. Much too late, that was a wakeup call for this woman who, by then daughterless, became a great crusader for lesbians and gays trying to cope in theologically conservative churches and families. As you can imagine, she found herself unwelcome in the church where she had invested much of her life as well as many other churches where she tried to be a member with the attitudes she had; she wasn’t welcome in many places.

Today, as you leave, you will have another opportunity, if you haven’t yet and if you so choose, to sign a petition supporting marriage equality for all citizens of Delaware. I think the two issues are connected. In our culture, marriage is one way of saying, “This is who I am in relationship to the person I love, and I am not ashamed that our hearts are united.”

As a pastoral counselor in a church setting for many years, I’ve observed that there are three main reasons someone is inclined to lie about who she or he really is.

1. I’m ashamed of who I am.
2. I fear you will reject me or try to hurt me if I tell you who I am.
3. I am afraid of who I am and owning who I am will make it seem more real and true than if I continue denying it.

1) I’m ashamed of who I am. There are all sorts of reasons that people feel shame, but we’ve learned from mental health professionals in the last few years that shame is one of the most destructive emotions anyone can carry around. Some people are ashamed of their background; they came up dirt poor. There is no moral flaw in being poor, but they dealt with the put downs to themselves and their parents and their siblings and felt hated or objectified just because they were poor. They hated being poor, and many of these folks carry a great deal of shame about that to the degree that they don’t want anyone to know.

One of my parishioners in another congregation came up like this, dirt poor, and he became so well to do that he really was ashamed he ever had been poor so he kept it to himself most of the time and only rarely would dare to discuss it with anyone. He once discussed it with me as he entertained me ironically at one of the most high class and expensive restaurants in the city where we went to church together. I haven’t been in his office in many years, but I’ll bet his huge framed poster is still there--the one that reads, “Poverty Sucks.”

In contrast, I had another parishioner in that same congregation who had also grown up dirt poor and had lived in a housing project with a single mom and, I think, one sibling. He wasn’t ashamed of his background in the least, and he’d tell you how he grew up in a heartbeat. The energy that manifested itself as shame in the life of the first gentleman pushed the second gentleman in an entirely different direction. The second gent knew when he found loans and grants to support him in getting a college education exactly what he’d do with his opportunity; he would learn money management, economics, and urban geography toward the end that he would create environments where there would be fewer poor people; those who were poor would live in better, safer housing. He succeeded tremendously in his efforts, which weren’t hampered by a graduate degree in public administration from an Ivy League school and a spouse who was regarded as one of the most gifted architects on the east coast. The governor of the state in which we lived appointed him as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. I think he served alongside that governor for the governor’s two terms.

Two very different responses from two highly successful people. One, though could never get past the shame he felt from being poor as a child. There are many other reasons some people are ashamed to tell you who they are.

2) I fear you will reject me or try to hurt me if I tell you who I am. This a powerful reason to keep quiet about who we are. Supporting the wrong side in many of the civil wars going on in the world today, can cost you your life if you tell the wrong person who you are, but it doesn’t have to be as extreme as that. The whole bullying phenomenon is based on someone letting the wrong person know who she or he really is and having that confidential information shared around a campus or over the internet. No wonder, a high percentage of otherwise honest people use false identities when they’re communicating online.

3) I am afraid of who I am and owning who I am will make it seem more real and true than if I continue denying it. This is often how an alcoholic or a drug addict think before getting into treatment. Someone’s admitting that she or he is an alcoholic doesn’t make her or him an alcoholic or more of an alcoholic; yet, the person with the illness often see it that way so she or he will deny addiction or alcoholism ‘til the cows come home.

It’s easier to live in the modern world if we can be comfortable telling people we encounter the essentials of who we are. I’m not talking about covering your car with bumper stickers making identity statements for you.

II.

We liberals in the Jesus Movement routinely interpret stories that are told about Jesus that make him more than just a remarkable person as icing with which the early church finished the cake. We say, and I certainly am among those think there is merit in recognizing this as we try to understand the process by which Jesus was remembered, that Jesus was, in effect, glamorized by those who wanted to tell his story as the legitimate foundation on which the Christian Church was built. To be blunt, many of us liberals and progressives believe that more was made of certain teachings and acts of Jesus than history or reason could justify. This is precisely what the brilliant, through much maligned Jesus Scholar, John Dominic Crossan, among many, means when he says that the central figure in the Christian faith whom we encounter in Christian scripture is clearly the Christ of faith and certainly not, or not so much, the Jesus of history. Another way interpreters of Christian scripture put this is by saying that the Jesus we get to know in the New Testament is very much the stained glass Jesus, and not the human being who really struggled, sweated, felt frustration, and who had to work to stay on point with the mission to which he was called.

The Jesus Seminar and first rate scholars from Albert Schweitzer to Elaine Pagels to Bart Ehrman have done and continue to provide us with an invaluable service in their efforts to help us see the Jesus behind his handlers. This way of interpreting Jesus didn’t apply across the board, however. By this I mean that Jesus doesn’t look so good in every story that was passed down about him such as in a few accounts where his own racial prejudice showed up early in his ministry. He would certainly leave this narrow-minded perspective behind him as he matured in his ministry, but it is surely there early on. This, then, leads me to say that the tradition Jesus and his earliest followers inherited by no means felt the need to tell the stories of their heroines and heroes only after those stories had been polished until the persons about whom the stories were told had their subjects polished to perfection. Rahab the prostitute, not Rabab the prophetess, hid some Hebrew spies and thereby saved their lives. We’re not told that Rahab gave up her life of harlotry after being touched by the faith of the Hebrew men who spent some time in her establishment. King David, widely regarded as Israel’s greatest king, was an adulterer and a murderer, and those life-facts are not removed from the stories that were told about him.

I want us to keep this in mind when we ponder today the stories about Peter and his lies about Jesus. Peter became the first head of the most influential expression of Christianity the world has ever known; Roman Catholics call him their first pope. This is the case even though Peter denied that he knew Jesus at all, and he left Jesus alone in Jesus’ darkest hour. Why not one of the other men or women in Jesus’ inner circle about whom no ugly stories could be told?

The story on which we focus today takes place shortly before Jesus’ execution. He would soon be arrested, beaten, and abused while some of the few Jews who hated him, and there were truly very few of them, figured out some charge they could concoct about him that would cause Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor assigned by the Emperor to keep the Jews in check, to send Jesus to his death. Just ahead of all this, there is a pivotal, damning conversation that Jesus had with the man who would get the prime leadership position in the Jesus Movement after Jesus was executed.

When they [that is, Jesus and his closest followers] had sung the hymn [following what we have come to call the Last Supper], they went out to the Mount of Olives. And Jesus said to them, “You will all become deserters; for it is written,

‘I will strike the shepherd,

and the sheep will be scattered.’

But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.” Peter said to him, “Even though all become deserters, I will not.” Jesus said to him, “Truly I tell you, this day, this very night, before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.” But Peter said vehemently, “Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.” And all of them said the same.

“All of them said the same.” Some of them meant it; Peter was one among them who absolutely did not mean it. It sounded nice. It sounded brave. It sounded valiant, even. Maybe on the surface Peter believed that of himself, but when the going got tough it was clear that Peter wasn’t about to suffer anything too dreadful just because he was a follower of Jesus. To save his hide, he would lie. He would lie three times in a matter of a few hours to try to convince accusers and nosy folk that he had no connection to Jesus whatsoever. How he got to be the head guy in the church with this on his record is beyond me, but he did; and it at least proves that the church at its best has never played, “Let’s pretend that the people we want to honor were or are perfect in every way.”

Still, Peter’s denial of Jesus was more than a little slip up. Remember what Jesus had said to all of his closest followers out on the Mount of Olives after the Last Supper: “You will all become deserters. You will all desert me and the cause for which we have worked together.” It must have broken Jesus’ heart to have verbalized what he felt in his heart was absolutely the case.

They all protested, but Peter protested the loudest. “If I have to die showing my love and support for you, Jesus, then I will have lived my life for the greatest of causes, and I will have no regrets. Dying because I’m closely connected to you will be an honor, a gift. These other so called followers of yours may be all talk, but you will see, Jesus, nothing could make me deny or desert you. Nothing in the world.”

Jesus said to Peter, “I love you, but you will not risk sharing my fate with me; you’re strong, but you don’t have that kind of strength. I’ll bet you that before the cock crows twice tonight, you will have denied me three times.” Peter’s heart was ripped apart, but somewhere down deep he knew that Jesus understood human behavior to a tee and would not likely be wrong although Peter wanted to prove him wrong.

So did he or didn’t he? Well, let’s see what the oldest of the four Gospels has to say about this tense situation.

Oh, wait. Before we get back to the biblical account, I need to tell you that middle eastern roosters in Jesus’ day were more vocal than modern American roosters who generally crow only once a day--at day break. According to a very highly respected Christian scripture scholar, Dr. William Lane, the ancient middle eastern roosters crowed about midnight, and then about an hour after midnight, and, finally, at daybreak. I have no idea what this is true. I don’t know what kinds of lighting patterns showed up in the sky, but I know that William Lane with whom many of my friends in Southern Seminary studied beyond their study with our own faculty; and he was a grade A scholar so if he says cocks crowed three times in any evening in the ancient middle east he must have some reliable source.

I have never come across a book in original Greek or translated into English that deals with the habits of barnyard animals in the time of Jesus. No doubt, such a book would be a great asset for us. We might have more knowledge of the animals that were in the barn the night Jesus was born in a barn. We might know something more of the little donkey he rode into Jerusalem for his final Passover celebration. Most importantly, we might find out why ancient middle eastern roosters crowed three times in a typical evening when most American and Canadian and British roosters today generally crow only at day break. Finally, the most pressing question of all, “Do the descendants of those thrice-crowing middle eastern cocks still crow three times in any evening as did their forebears and so dependably that Jesus could use the three expected crowings to provide the time frame within which Peter would show his true colors?”

III.

One of the people Jesus’ small band of enemies tried to get involved in getting Jesus’ death sentence rolling was the high priest. Most of them had to know better than that, but I guess they were determined to pursue every possible avenue to get Rome to call for his crucifixion. While Jesus was taken before the Jewish high priest, Peter waited in a courtyard below where the high priest would have heard concerns in his residence in the wee hours. While he was pacing around down there, a servant girl who worked in the residence of the high priest saw Peter standing near a fire trying to stay warm, and she dared to walk up to him--which women did not routinely do with men. She stared at him for a few minutes, and finally said, “I know where I’ve seen you. You were with Jesus when the Roman guard brought him here to the High Priest’s residence. I saw you. We all know that birds of a feather flock together so whatever he is you are also.”

Peter responded in the hearing of all others gathered there that fateful night, “You stupid girl, your vision must be so good you can see in the dark. Why don’t you shut up your ramblings. I can’t even understand what else you’re babbling on about, but no, I definitely was not with Jesus when the guards brought him to the high priests; otherwise, I’d be on trial too.” As Peter walked away from her and those curiosity seekers her accusations had gathered, he heard a cock crow; it was either midnight or about 1 a.m., and Peter’s stomach went into knots.

This servant girl wasn’t going to be blown off by some big, boisterous fisherman. She saw him again, and he she made the charge again in front of several bystanders, “This man is absolutely one of the followers of Jesus. I saw them together just a few hours ago. Who else would be walking with Jesus as the guards were bringing him to a hearing if not one of his associates. There’s no doubt that this is the man I saw with Jesus.”

Peter denied it. “Look, you little busy body. I already told you that you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m here to see the high priest on personal business in the morning; I’m not going to disturb him at this late hour, but I’ll be one of the first in line to see him in the morning. Again, butt out, and stop talking about matters you know nothing about.”

Evidently, Peter was able to silence the servant girl, but by the time he was able to do that some of the others waiting to see the high priest in the morning said to Peter, “You know, the girl makes sense. Jesus spent some time in Galilee, and your dialect tells us that you are a Galilean. You just happen to be here at the high priest’s residence while Jesus is inside for a hearing. Who are you trying to fool?”

This pushed Peter over the edge. He began cussing like a sailor at those who accused him; oh, he was a sailor. In the midst of the angry curse words, he had those nosy people to know that he was not one of Jesus’ associates and, in fact, didn’t know Jesus at all. He’d heard of him as some of them had, and that was that. Now unless they wanted a little something physical to help them believe his story, they’d better get the hades away from him and shut up.”

Peter had barely finished his diatribe when some cock crowed. It was the second crowing of the evening, so it was an hour after midnight or daybreak.

Peter stomped away from the residence of the high priest, but as he did Jesus’ simple prediction branded itself in his brain, “Before the cock crows twice, you will have denied me thrice.” And burley Peter broke down and cried like a baby. He had the man he loved and admired more than any other. He was petrified of finding himself sentenced to death as Jesus was almost certain to be so he lied about his relationship to Jesus even though he’d sworn to Jesus that he’d rather die than deny him. It didn’t work out that way. He cried because for the rest of his life he’d have to say he denied his true identity at his most crucial opportunity to speak up and say who he truly was. We can’t make up for lost moments like those. Peter didn’t have the opportunity to gather up those who had heard him deny his affiliation with Jesus and see that they understood the truth. “You know, folks, I lied earlier because I was afraid. I have spent nearly every moment with Jesus since he first asked me to join him in his ministry three years ago. His message is the message of life, and I can’t deny that I love him or that my life has been transformed through his take on what our Hebrew ancestors left in writing for us. Therefore, if you want to put me on trial too, it’s only fair.” Peter had lost his only chance to say who he really was in the hearing of most of those people.

King Henry II appointed his pal, Thomas A Beckett, to be the Archbishop of Canterbury, assuming as in nearly all political appointments that the appointee continues to serve at the whim of the appointer. Strange thing happened, though. While doing his job, while performing his ministry, he came to believe that God, not any king, was the head of the church, and he told Henry he could no longer live by the demands of the monarchy. His allegiance would have to be to God and church. Soon thereafter, Henry had Thomas put to death at the altar of the Canterbury Cathedral. Thomas knew what awaited him, but he prayed and waited; he would not run and pretend to be someone he was not.

Joan of Arc, as you well know, was burnt at stake for refusing to recant her calling from God and the presence of God she claimed guided her through what she did for faith and country.

The so called Oxford Protestant Martyrs, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, were burned at the stake in 1555 at Oxford for refusing to embrace Roman Catholic faith of Queen Mary I.

In North Korea, the Communist government takes Christianity to be one of the dominant threats to its authority and has instructed law enforcement personnel to arrest not only the suspected dissident but also the three previous generations of her family to root out the bad influence. Still, many of those in the Jesus’ Movement refuse to deny who they are in terms of their faith commitments, and they and their relatives die as a result of their telling the truth.

Angeles Arrien said: “Something definitely changes when we finally summon the courage to risk telling the truth about who we are and are not.”

Peter

Jacob's Sons Lie to Jacob

I.

Dr. Martha Edwards, a psychologist, is Director of the Developing Child and Family Program at the Ackerman Institute; she is a specialist in the “favored child syndrome” field and in her practice deals with favored children, un-favored children, parents who make those calls, and the whole family damaged and derailed by parental favoritism of one child over another. When she begins working with a family hurting from the results of this unhealthy syndrome, one of the first facts she attempts to ascertain is why this parent-child behavior pattern has happened. The favored child may be favored by one or both parents in a two-parent household; or, less healthily, each parent may favor a different child. In a two-parent, two-child home, at least each child has someone to favor her or him. If there are more than two children, the problems for the un-favored child or children could be worse. She or he realizes that neither of two possible parents makes her or him the favorite. How did this begin? Why does this continue?

Dr. Edwards says that the most common reason is that the child who becomes the favored child has a temperament easier to deal with than the un-favored child or children, and of course what is easier to deal with varies greatly from one parent to the next. Similarly, the favored child’s natural way of approaching life is more admired by the parent who favors her or him than is the case with the un-favored child or children. For example, a parent may admire the spunk of a child who is a take charge kind of person in the making while not admiring passive people, especially whiney ones, even if one of those people is that parent’s own child; now the parent in this case may be a take charge person who likes that personal trait, or the parent may be one of those passive, whiney types who hates that trait in herself or himself and, rather naturally therefore, in her or his un-favored child or children.

Some other reasons one child might be preferred over her or his siblings is the child’s gender. There have been and remain cultures around the world who, for example, favor male children over female children. This was clearly the case in the Hebrew and Jewish cultures that produced the Hebrew Bible and gave a foundation to the values of Jesus and his earliest followers too.

I was in seminary with a missionary kid whose parents had served on Africa before being brought back to the United States to work in an administrative role at the mission board. The African culture in which he’d been raised favored males, regardless of where they came in the birth order. He was the baby of the family, the third child born after two sisters. How much the family allowed John to be favored wasn’t known outside the family; maybe not at all. Still, there were frequent jokes, at least they sounded like jokes--you know how that works, about the favored son thing in many social gathering with this lovely family.

In China today, infant girls are imperiled. To control population, each married couple is permitted by the government to have one child and one child only. Because a son is of greater value to the family in terms of societal influence and moneymaking potential, parents prefer a son who can make them proud during his growing up years and then take care of them in their old age in a country where there is no social service support for aging parents; if anyone is to take care of them, it will have to be their child. The wealthy aren’t as troubled about care in old age as they are able to save enough money to see that they will be taken care of in their golden years; even so, they prefer a son.

What this has led to, tragically, is the willingness of some families to murder a baby girl at or soon after birth so the parents can try again for a male child. You’re already thinking about the most logical problem with this mentality. Men can produce children on their own; females, if for no other reason, are necessities.

There were some experimental approvals of certain families being allowed to have two children for observation to see if this 30-something year old policy was still functional. The Chinese government decided that it was, so in about 2009 the law was extended at least another decade.

Kids want and need to think of their parents as on their side no matter what, but that’s not always the case. Obese children who suffer ridicule away from home, especially at school, come home to parents who may not ridicule them, but who certainly favor their trim or toned siblings. Small-minded parents may also favor the child with few or no adolescent acne issues over the poor kid who has to struggle with the physical and emotional ravages of acne.

When no obvious reason for favoritism of one child over another is evident, Dr. Brown goes on a search for circumstances of the favored child’s birth. A parent who loses a parent to death shortly before a child is born may favor that child over the others simply because she or he is a reminder of how joy can follow sorrow. A child who is born premature but who survives against the odds may be a favored child from there on out. In exactly the same way, a child who struggles through an illness and makes it, may well be the favored child of one or both parents simply because the parents realize how closely they came to losing that precious child to this world.

A child who is born after the parents thought they couldn’t have children any more, especially if that child comes along a little later than most parents have kids, may be a favored child. And why not, that child is living proof that the father is still kicking in the lovemaking department, and the mother feels a little bit like super woman to be told post-menopause that some feisty little egg went and got herself fertilized after all eggs were supposed to be gone or retired. Those parents may quickly lose those boosts to their vanity after 17 consecutive nights with no all night sleep.

If parents begin having marital problems, Dr. Brown has discovered that the child who is least like the spouse about to be kicked to the curb may quickly, suddenly became the favored of child of the parent who wants to be rid of a spouse who is much more like another child who just as quickly, suddenly becomes un-favored.

When parents play favorites with their children, both the favored and the un-favored children suffer. The un-favored children feel the rejection of being inadequate. She or he isn’t inclined to like self and will frequently, therefore, fall into patterns of low self-esteem and may easily become depressed. A child who doesn’t feel favored by a parent may lose for life the possibility of healthy self-esteem.

Being a favored child may not be a picnic, says Dr. Brown. She or he may feel guilty, knowing that one or both parents favor her or him over the siblings the favored child loves. The favored child also gets the unwritten and unspoken message that in order to stay in that favored slot, and it does have its rewards, there are standards to be upheld. This is to say, once the favored child displays traits or behaviors not on the approved list, she or he can fall from grace faster than the rich lawmakers in this country can come up with yet another reason the poor really should have no rights at all.

The only real way to avoid this pattern is to avoid homogenized approaches to parenting. Each parent must have a special, individualized, and somewhat private relationship with each child so not only are there family activities, but also there are times when a parent spends time with one child at a time, doing that child’s favorite activities and living out undivided attention to that child for this slice of time. If there must be family votes taken from time to time, each child must have a chance to express her or his opinion without interference or ridicule from any other family member. When the vote is taken, the majority must rule. We parents must never pretend to empower children only to yank the power with which we appeared to bless them right out from under their feet.

II.

If you happened to be here last week, or if you read the sermon or listened to the podcast, you know we ended our story of Jacob on a sad as well as an unresolved note. Jacob had lied to his elderly, blind father, Isaac, and gotten by with it, to his financial benefit.

I’m not a karma guy myself, but I will just point out that in today’s story the tables are turned. Not one of Jacob’s sons lie to him, but ten of the twelve lie to their father. Some would say this is the conclusion to the story last week that seemed to have no real conclusion.

Regarding the lying of children, adult children, to their father in a culture where respect of parents was an integral part of religious law, some would say, “Law or no law, he had it coming. He through an elaborate scheme, which his mother helped concoct, took advantage of his father’s age and disability expressly for reasons of greed and selfishness.” Some would say, “What goes around comes around.” Some would say, “Karma’s a witch.” Some would say, “Que sera sera.” Some would say, “There’s only another half an hour left in this Gathering.”

The etiology of the big lie before us today was a favored child dynamic in Jacob’s household. Jacob’s two younger sons, numbers eleven and twelve out of twelve, Joseph and Benjamin, were born to him by his favored wife, Rachel, who died giving birth to baby Benjamin. Both Joseph and Benjamin were favored children because of who their mother was. Benjamin was the baby in the family, and the older brothers understood how the last child often is babied. Joseph was next to last, though, and all he had going for him was his mama. Perhaps the favored treatment of Joseph had begun before Rachel’s death, before Benjamin was born. Maybe Rachel herself had urged it along. Whatever the reason, Joseph was the pomegranate of his father’s eye.

Coddling was one sign of Joseph’s favored status. The division of work responsibilities among the sons was another indication that the older sons simply weren’t held in the same high regard as was Joseph. Then, there was the blatant, unbalanced gift giving. Joseph got the nicer gifts; parents, sensible and fair parents, know very well that there must be great similarity in the value and visual appeal among gifts given to a family of children. Children will notice if one sibling gets a nicer gift.

Interestingly, or oddly, enough, depending on your point of view, the lightening rod for the brotherly hatred of Joseph was a special garment that Jacob bought for Joseph. Some translators along the way misinterpreted what the writer of Genesis was trying to describe. The coat--it was actually an indoors garment, not an outdoor garment for weathering the elements--was taken by translator after translator to have irked the brothers because it was brightly colored and beautiful to look at. In reality, and I notice that Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber has still not changed this in his musical despite my many letters to him. He still calls his musical, “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat.” The garment, alas, was not multicolored; chances are, even nomadic leaning women didn’t wear multicolored garments. If someone in a household were going to wear them, and if the various dyes were available to people on the move or at least ready to be on the move with little notice, they likely would have been used in women’s clothing, not men’s.

The thing about the infamous garment of Jacob’s favored son, Joseph, was its long sleeves. The long sleeves were a blatant, visual reminder that Joseph didn’t do outdoor work. Any tasks assigned to him, if there were any, were inside chores. The older ten brothers had short-sleeved garments, necessities and not gifts at that, showing any observer that they did the outside work. They herded the sheep in the relentless sun. They traveled from huge pasturing area to huge pasturing area to care for the sheep that kept the father wealthy knowing once the money was all divided up at his death it might be nothing to laugh at, but they weren’t going to be wealthy enough to lean back for the rest of their lives and rely on servants to get the work done. Older sons consigned to sweaty, sometimes dangerous, outdoor work; baby Benjamin; and Daddy’s pet in his long-sleeved, indoor only toga.

Because the older sons didn’t make it all the way home for dinner every evening, depending on their herding locales, this didn’t happen every night, but certainly every time they all sat down to a meal together, Joseph, intentionally or not, was pouring salt into open, emotional wounds, always wearing his long-sleeved garment to meals and making sure to call attention to the long sleeves when he was trying to pass one of his brothers the dinner bread. “Reuben, the bread hasn’t made it around to you; let me pass it--OOPS, almost got my sleeve in the olive oil...can’t let that happen, can we, Daddy?” Jacob smiled, and the older ten brothers seethed.

To make matters worse (could they be worse in terms of family dysfunction?), Joseph started having these dreams, and he interpreted them to build himself up and suggest that his brothers just didn’t measure up to him. That is to say, Jacob held him in special esteem because he deserved it. He was, in fact, better than his ten older brothers. It would have been one thing to have the dreams and keep the interpretations to himself or share the interpretations just with his father, but no, no, no. Joseph waited until his brothers had trudged from a long day or a long period of several days of herding sheep, sweaty and exhausted, that Joseph would drone on about his dreams of superiority while his hungry brothers tried to maintain enough of an appetite to take in some much needed nourishment.

There were two dreams Joseph said he dreamed that, when he interpreted them, made his brothers irate at him, which by this point didn’t take much. In the first dream, Joseph and his brothers were in the field binding grain into sheaves. His brothers started dying laughing when Joseph told them this dream. Joseph had never worked outdoors a day in his life. He wouldn’t know a sheaf from a sheik. In any case, when the binding of sheaves was nearing completion, Joseph’s single sheaf--that’s all he’d been able to manage even in his own dream of self-aggrandizement. Each of his brothers had bound several bushels of grain into sheaves. Joseph’s single sheaf, in the dream, stood up, and, lo and behold, all the sheaves his brothers had bound bowed down in honor of Joseph’s sheaf. The obvious interpretation was that the day was coming when he would have dominion over his brothers.

“Stupid dreamer,” they called him. He seemed to be forgetting that there would come a day when Jacob would die, and the law of land would give his firstborn, Reuben, something like half of his estate, dividing up the other half among the eleven younger brothers. Reuben couldn’t wait for that great day. Finally, his rightful superiority over Joseph would be reestablished.

There was another dream, a little more complicated to interpret. In this second dream, the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to Joseph. Oh, brother! Joseph’s implications of what this dream promised made even his utterly devoted father angry with him. Jacob, his father, was the sun. The moon was Leah, the mother of several of the other brothers, still living. The eleven brothers were same eleven, including young Benjamin, who had bowed down to the sheaf of Joseph in the first dream.

As dinner was breaking up, and each member of the family going in her or his own direction, some of the brothers began to say to each other, “This is enough. This is WAY more than enough. This kook is over the top by now; he has got to go. We have to find some way to get rid of this pompous dreamer if we ever expect to have any kind of real life again.”

III.

One day when the ten older brothers were a distance from home and couldn’t get back home for nourishment, Father Jacob sent Joseph to take food to them. He seemed happy to have taken on that task, but when the brothers saw him coming, the ten of them were in agreement that this was the perfect opportunity to get rid of him. Several of the ten were so angry they agreed without discussing the matter that the thing to do was to put their kid brother to death; only because of the intervention of Jacob’s firstborn son and Joseph’s oldest brother, Reuben, was Joseph spared from murder at the hands of his own brothers--a group re-creation of the Cain and Abel story. Reuben said, “He’s a jerk, and has worked my last nerve just as he has each of you; but he’s our brother. We can’t kill our brother no matter how much we hate him, no matter how much he gets on our nerves. There’s a pit over there; let’s throw him in the pit and let nature take its course without the shedding of any blood.”

On the surface, leaving someone to broil under the sun’s rays without food or water seems more cruel than instant death, but there’s a hint in the story that Rueben had in mind finding a way to keep Joseph from dying and getting him back roughed up but not harmed to the father who loved him so much.

The one thing all brothers are agreed on is ripping that infernal long-sleeved robe off of him before tossing him in the pit. Then, they sat down to lunch--the lunch, by the way, that they wouldn’t have had if not for Joseph. While eating, they saw a band of Ishmaelite merchants coming their way on camels. The brothers had another idea, a profitable idea, which would keep Joseph alive at least as long as he was in their sight. They sold their brother as a slave to the Ishmaelite merchants.

Reuben seems not to have been in on the sale. He returns from somewhere, maybe a pit stop, to find Joseph, and he rips his garments, which was one sign of mourning or intense regret in their culture.

In the mean time, the other brothers want to get on with their lives without Joseph around to keep them reminded of how un-favored they were in their father’s eyes in comparison to him. This is how the writer of Genesis told the climax to the story:

Then they took Joseph’s robe, slaughtered a goat, and dipped the robe in the blood. They had the long robe with sleeves taken to their father, and they said, “This we have found; see now whether it is your son’s robe or not.” He recognized it, and said, “It is my son’s robe! A wild animal has devoured him; Joseph is without doubt torn to pieces.” Then Jacob tore his garments, and put sackcloth on his loins, and mourned for his son many days. All his sons and all his daughters sought to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted, and said, “No, I shall go down to Sheol to my son, mourning.” Thus his father bewailed him.

The older nine or ten brothers--we’re not sure if Reuben participated in the deception--lie to their father, but they do so indirectly. They dipped the robe they resented so much into goat’s blood, and the way the story is told we have reason to believe that they didn’t take the robe to their father but had that done by some third party. In any case, Jacob draws the only conclusion he can--that Joseph has been torn to pieces by a wild animal, and he braces to carry his heavy grief to his grave and to his shadowy life in the abode of the dead.

The sons are back in time to join their sisters in comforting or trying to comfort their father, but there is no comfort. The lie the brothers had told, either directly or indirectly, ripped out his old heart. We might have wished that being such a good liar himself he would have been able to recognize a lie when someone told him one, but that didn’t happen in this case. The brothers had a chance to relieve their father’s pain, but they played along, Reuben too by now, as if they could not rebut Jacob’s painful conclusion. They didn’t care enough about their father’s pain to stop it so they let the lie live on.

In a list I found on the importance of teaching children honesty, I found this one-line lesson: “Watch out for silent lies. When you know about a lie and keep quiet, the lie lives on.” Maybe we find ourselves in situations where we absolutely have not told a lie, but we keep the truth to ourselves when we see someone suffering as a result of the lie told to her or him. When we keep silent in that kind of situation, we become a part of the lying process, because we let the lie live even though we have the absolute power to replace the lie with truth and have the lie evaporate once and for all. Yet, often we keep silent anyway. That makes us liars too, doesn’t it? Not everyone agrees that it does. Miguel de Unamuno, though, has said eloquently, “At times to be silent is to lie.”

Pastor Martin Niemoeller, the German pastor in the generation of Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, intellectually opposed Hitler long before he did anything about it. In other words, he along with numerous German intellectuals kept silent when they, like Bonhoeffer, should have spoken up to call Hitler’s multiple lies what they were. Bonhoeffer died for refusing to keep silent; he would not pretend to Germany or to the rest of the world that all was well in Hitlerland, and so he was hung just outside one of the barracks of the Flossenburg prison camp where he, with no ethnic attachment to Judaism in any way, was held. A few days later, World War II was officially over, but Bonhoeffer’s friends, colleagues, and admirers were permanently shaken up. Niemoeller at first supported what Hitler seemed to be about and only later was in that group of silent or relatively silent opponents of Hitler’s. When he would no longer keep silent, he too was sent to a concentration camp where he spend seven years, managing to stay alive.

He would later speak to the world this confessional warning since he had learned so painfully that not speaking up when one should--in his case allowing his silence to endorse Hitler’s death crusades--is equivalent to lying:

First they came for the communists,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for me,

and there was no one left to speak out for me.

I think our story of grief-stricken old Jacob crying his eyes out and ripping his garments because of his sense of pain and loss, thinking that Joseph is dead, while nine or ten of his sons who know that isn’t true lack enough courage and integrity among the lot of them to break the silence and tell Jacob the truth. There was no proof that the slave traders who bought Joseph would treat him well and protect his life; that is to say, had he rebelled against them in any way, they might have killed him in anger. Still, Jacob was entitled to the truth and any hope that left him with.

I was glad this week that some out of work Republicans and some Republicans who are members of unions that participate in collective bargaining finally spoke up to their representatives in the House and Representatives and said, “We have to have jobs, and those of us who are not independently wealthy intend to remain affiliated with those who will go to bat for us management wants to take millions in perks while our children have no health care.” Bravo for those with the guts to speak up, even if the Tea Party revokes their teabags.

My dear friends, if being connected to the Jesus Movement doesn’t require us to speak up for the ostracized or the downtrodden, then it requires nothing of us at all and allows us to become a social club where talking about Jesus is polite and cute and quaint. But let us be sure we understand the penalty for our silence; if we fail or refuse to speak up for those who suffer and struggle, even if we don’t particularly like them, we have no ministry at all and no reason to exist under any umbrella that would cause others mistakenly to associate us with Jesus’ concerns and Jesus’ way of living.