Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS
Genesis 39:1-23
September 25, 2022
Something VERY exciting happened to me earlier this week. I was searching for a stock photo of “communion” and found a photo of a WOMAN pastor serving communion. I stopped scrolling and my heart skipped a beat. Even in the year of our Lord 2022, it’s rare to see images of people who look like me serving as pastors.
I was reminded of all those delightful videos that took the internet by storm the last couple of weeks - little Black girls squealing with delight at seeing Ariel from the new live-action Little Mermaid who looks like them.
Representation matters.
And that’s why I want to lift up Joseph and his Technicolor queerness in today’s sermon.
First, a word about queerness.
It’s a word that, once upon a time, simply meant anything non-normative, strange, unusual. Over time it became a derogatory word for gay folks. A slur. And in the past several decades, it’s been reclaimed by many people who are LGBTQ+ as a positive umbrella term for all kinds of sexualities and gender identities.
It’s a term that’s intentionally ambiguous - not meant to be placed in a box. Being outside of the box is the whole everything when it comes to queerness. Thanks be to God. And this is a sermon in celebration of queerness in all its multicolored, multifaceted brilliance.
Presbyterian Pastor Mihee Kim-Kort has written a beautiful book called Outside the Lines: How Embracing Queerness Will Transform Your Faith. Kim-Kort takes an expansive view of queerness, arguing that while queerness is primarily about gender and sexuality it also “transgresses boundaries and allows us to simply be, without label or category…Queer is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. It is particular and expansive. It’s less definitive; it does not point to you or me and say, ‘You are queer,’ but instead makes a wide-open space for all people to find footing in relation to one another and their own lives….[Queerness] always tends toward a dynamic generosity.” [1]
So with that generosity of spirit, let’s dive into the Joseph story, shall we?
If this is your first time meeting Joseph, please know that we won’t be able to do the whole story justice. It’s a long one. Almost 10 whole chapters. He gets more airtime than any other character in the Book of Genesis. If you don’t know the story, I hope you’ll check it out.
But the very basics, just so we’re all on the same page: Jacob had 12 sons and at least 1 daughter with multiple wives and partners. His favorite wife is Rachel and that’s Joseph's mother. Joseph’s story is one of immense ups-and-downs. He is his father’s favorite son, which makes his older brothers very jealous. They throw him in a pit and sell him into slavery. He goes to Egypt where he is sold to a big-deal guy named Potiphar. He rises to prominence in Potiphar’s household but is then propositioned and assaulted by Potiphar’s wife. He refuses her and she has him arrested. In prison he uses his brains and charm to rise up once again. Eventually he becomes the Pharaoh's right-hand-man, helps save everyone from famine, reconciles with his family, and lives happily ever after to the ripe old age of 110.
Now despite the fact that many-a heterosexual female has enjoyed Donny Osmond’s portrayal of Joseph as a total hottie on Broadway, there is something decidedly queer about our hero. This isn’t to say that he’s gay - we really don’t know enough about him to say that with authority. But there are many things in this story that make it clear that he did not adhere to cultural norms for gender and sexuality - he was transgressive, free, different, queer.
This isn’t just some newfangled woke interpretation of the Bible for the 21st century, either. Biblical scholars since ancient times weren’t quite sure what to do with the complexities of gender in Joseph’s story.
I am indebted to many Biblical scholars including Rabbi Irwin Keller and Biblical scholar and artist Peterson Tuscano for all the fun facts I’m about to share with you, so I encourage you to check the notes on the sermon later if you’d like to learn more. [2]
When Joseph graces the scene in Chapter 37 we are told that he is 17 years old and that he was “a youngster.” Which is odd for two reasons. First, we just learned his age, so why qualify? Second, a 17 year old in this culture would have been a man, not a youngster. It’s possible that the author is trying to convey that Joseph was somehow not as manly as we might expect. Midrash from over 1000 years ago says, “Why does it say he was a youngster? Because he engaged in childish things: tending his eyes, lifting his heels, primping his hair.” [3] Now you know why Donny’s eyeliner looks so good.
Joseph’s father gives him a special garment to wear: a k’tonet passim, a phrase that is only used one other place in the Hebrew Bible. In 2 Samuel 13 we hear the horrific story of Tamar, daughter of King David who was raped by her half-brother. In that story, she wears the same thing. And although the Joseph story doesn’t explain what a k’tonet passim is, 2 Samuel explicitly states it is a special kind of garment worn by virgin daughters of the king. In other words, a princess dress.
This k’tonet passim enrages his brothers. Perhaps the brothers are just jealous that he is given a special gift, but Toscano wonders, then, why they choose to destroy the garment entirely. Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep it? There is something that troubles them deeply about this garment. And there is something that troubles the brothers deeply about Joseph. He doesn’t fit. He’s not welcome. He’s bullied. Sold into slavery.
One can’t help but hear resonances with the painful stories of too many LGBTQ youth who are bullied and cast out of their own families. And those who end up on the streets, vulnerable to trafficking and violence as they make their way in the world. And we are mindful of the intersectionalities called to mind in this story, too. Joseph is not only gender nonconforming but an immigrant, from a marginalized ethnic group, and enslaved.
We notice the ways the interlocking identities push him into a situation in today’s story where he absolutely cannot win. Though he is valued by Potiphar, he is still enslaved, still foreign, still “other” and, therefore, still easy prey for a woman who also occupies an in-between social location. Pharaoh’s wife is powerful enough to think she should always get what she wants, but we know her power was precarious as a woman. And so we see a story here as old as time, two people marginalized by their various identities trying to make their way in an empire where they are not fully valued and respected.
The story continues and Joseph does eventually land on his feet. He’s brilliant and gutsy and supremely confident and fabulous and easy on the eyes, too. We are told that he is beautiful and well-built. The only other place this phrase is used in the Hebrew Bible is to describe Joseph’s mother, Rachel. Joseph with the well-coiffed hair, carefully-penciled eyes, high heels, and princess coat is described as gorgeous in the same way his mother was gorgeous.
In many ways, he serves as a stand-in matriarch after Rachel’s death. Jacob loved Joseph because he reminded him of Rachel. And Joseph serves as a mother figure to his younger brother, Benjamin, protecting him. Later in the story when the two are reunited we are even told that Joseph’s womb is moved when he recognizes his brother and he calls him, “my son.” [3] Joseph has a lot of big mama bear energy for a guy.
The maternal energy doesn’t end there. The very last thing we are told about Joseph in Genesis is that he lived to be 110 and welcomed his great grandchildren into the world “on his knees.”
First of all, it would have been unheard of for a male relative to be present at a birth. Period. But the phrase “born on Joseph’s knees” is particularly mind-bending because this is what a mother, sister, female friend would have done to help a laboring mother. Essentially it’s a posture of serving as a chair to provide physical and emotional support for the person giving birth. In some instances, women who couldn’t give birth themselves would even take on this posture while another woman served as a surrogate for them and, in this way, their presence at the birth legitimized their relationship to the newborn child. It’s a distinctly maternal posture. One that would have been deeply unusual, strange, unexpected, transgressive – queer - for a man. [3]
Why does Joseph’s queerness matter? Why bring it up at all? There’s so much to this story - why lift up this one aspect of his life?
Well, because representation matters. And what we have here, my friends, is a queer Biblical hero. Although Joseph’s brothers despise him and kick him out - although the deck is stacked against him again and again, he thrives. Joseph matters in the short term - he moves the story forward from Genesis to Exodus, as we’ll see next week. Joseph is the poster boy for an upstanding, faithful Jew. It’s no accident that Jesus’s father, also a dreamer, is also named Joseph. In some circles he is even seen as an archetype of Christ - a forerunner who shows us what Christ is like. [4]
Joseph is strong, persistent, confident, deeply intentional, brilliant, faithful, and favored by God. He is a role-model who graces the stage for ten whole chapters of our Bible. He is that rare character in Genesis who pretty much gets it all right.
His queerness matters and should be celebrated because it reminds us that queerness is not to be “tolerated” but that LGBTQ+ people are full, unique, complex, faithful, imperfect humans created in God’s image. Our queer heroes have much to teach us about perseverance, wisdom, fierce self-love, courage, and what it looks like to live free.
And so I close with a love song to queerness by the Rev. Emily Scott:
For the ways, visible and invisible, that I am in-between,
For movement toward an honest self that crashes through false binaries,
For the freedoms, won by those before us and those among us and those who will come,
to live in liminal ways,
For Queering. For Queerness. I give thanks. [5]
NOTES:
[1] Kim-Kort, Mihee. Outside the Lines (p. 4). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.
[2] Rabbi Keller’s paper can be found here: https://www.irwinkeller.com/itzikswell/2021/12/2/josephs-womb-gender-complexity-in-the-story-of-joseph and Peterson Tuscano’s video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkikBKW8vmQ
[4] https://dtjsoft.com/home2/joseph-a-type-of-christ/
[5] Kim-Kort, Mihee. Outside the Lines (p. 212). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.
