The seventh generation

 

Genesis 37: 1-4, 12-28
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
August 13, 2023

Photo of a Black Lives Matter protest sign: "This is everyone's fight". Sign is held by a young Black teen with dreadlocks wearing a white mask and a t-shirt that reads "Ready Steady" and an adult White person whose hands can be seen. A young Black teen stands behind with very short black hair, wearing a black mask and a gray t-shirt with unreadable print.

Earlier this week I was relating a childhood story to David but I couldn’t remember all of the details. Then I realized that I was now the only one who might remember anything connected to this story. My father and brother are gone, and I know my mother’s memories of this particular camping trip are sketchy at best. Even so, my mom reminded me recently that if there is anything I want to know about her life, now is the time to ask.



If our own personal histories are so dear to us, because they shape us and inform us and future generations of who we are, we know how vital it is to learn communal histories, whether it be a faith community or small town, a city or state, an entire nation or a whole people.



The author of this story in the book of Genesis has given us several clues to the communal or family history of Joseph and his brothers. This isn’t just a story about Joseph but about several generations. First, we are reminded that his father Jacob has had a name change, after striving with a divine being who then calls him Israel, because Jacob persevered and would not let go without a blessing. Next, we are told that Joseph tended the family flock with his brothers, the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, the servant women to Leah and Rachel who became third and fourth wives to Joseph’s father. Remember that Joseph and Benjamin were favored children because their mother was Rachel, the woman that Jacob desired and loved most.



Whenever there is favoritism and hierarchy in a family, there are no benign characters and certainly no binary divisions like hero and villain. Everyone is complicated. Joseph winds up saving his family from famine but first they must suffer the ego of a spoiled child who rats out his brothers. The sons of Bilhah and Zilpah conspire to do Joseph harm yet consider what it’s been like for them to grow up and be raised in his oversized shadow. It’s pretty obvious that Joseph was given more than his brothers. In the end, the violence that they visit upon Joseph is to throw him into a pit, until Midianite traders find him, lift him out and sell him into slavery to the Ishmaelites.



Here too the text gives us clues to this family history. The Midianites are the descendants of Abraham and Keturah, Abraham’s second wife. The Ishmaelites are the offspring of Abraham and Hagar, who was a servant to Sarah, Abraham’s first wife—again both peoples are less-favored children whose mothers were servants or considered less-than.



The story of humanity in Genesis begins this way with Adam created first and Eve second, as though somehow that establishes a hierarchy rather than a partnership. Cain and Abel are the proverbial case study in sibling rivalry, God preferring Abel over Cain, beginning the pattern of the older overthrown by the younger: Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Joseph over his brothers. It also sets the stage for solving conflict with violence, the trauma of which echoes through generations after. There truly is no such thing as an isolated incident.



Last weekend there was an all-out brawl on the riverfront of the Alabama River in Montgomery. It began when a Black co-captain of a riverboat asked the White owner of a pontoon boat to move out of the way. After 45 minutes he not only would not comply but became vocally and physically belligerent, shoving and striking the captain. When the captain defended himself, four other White boaters came running and assaulted him. Black onlookers ran and one swam to his defense and soon an absolute melee broke out between White and Black people.



Now before any of us pass judgment about the use of violence to solve a conflict, I’m thankful that the only weapons that were used were fists and a folding chair. Did we consider that these Black defenders were trying to prevent what could be called a lynching? Is our discomfort also a sign of our privilege that prefers what Dr. Martin Luther King called “a negative peace which is the absence of tension rather than a positive peace which is the presence of justice”? Privilege isn’t just about what we’ve been given, but also the things we were never subjected to.

This is likewise a time when knowing communal history is vital to understanding how a community and a people have been shaped.



Montgomery is 60% Black and for the first time in 200 years the city elected a Black mayor, Steven Reed in 2019. He said “this was an unfortunate incident which never should have occurred” but it was also one borne out of seething racism and White privilege disrespecting Black bodies going back generations. Because of the Alabama River, Montgomery was one of the busiest slave-trading cities in the South and was the first capital city of the Confederacy. It is where Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus. Alabama is where the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery took place, Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, four young Black girls murdered with a bomb in their church, Gov. George Wallace who vowed there would be “Segregation Forever”. And just recently Alabama closed 31 DMV locations in counties that are home to poor and Black people, making it harder for them to obtain a driver’s license in a state that requires a photo ID to vote.



The stories in the book of Genesis remind us that beginnings are important because they shape the narratives that form us. This brawl didn’t begin last week but 150 years ago to the Civil War and 400 years ago to the beginning of this nation. Racism and White supremacy are baked into this country. They are literally in the air we breathe, the water we bathe in, and they affect all of us.



Many Indigenous peoples live by the concept of the seventh generation, that in our words, behavior and actions we are to consider the seven generations that come after us and to also remember the seven generations that came before us. It is a lived recognition that we are all connected—the earth, its creatures, all of us interdependent, past, present, and future.



And so when we consider what reparations might mean, let us think about reparations generationally. Knowledge and skills that should’ve been building African nations were stolen and they built this one instead. The generational trauma of that racism is still with us now. Imagine the effect of the decision to repair the past will have on seven generations into the future. Imagine the effect of the decision to repair the earth will have on seven generations into the future. Reparations, the work of repair, says “no” to hierarchy, “no” to White supremacy, “no” to systems of harm and “yes” to healing, “yes” to liberation, “yes” to the future. And this needs to be stated loud and clear from White Christian pulpits and churches in a time when Christian Nationalism is on the rise.



We are the seventh generation, the inheritors of the decisions made before us, decisions that led to the systemic dehumanization of one people and the self-interest and enshrinement of violence in another. One day we will be the seventh generation remembered for what we have done. Activist Valarie Kaur wrote, “We will be somebody’s ancestors someday. And if we get this right, they will inherit not our fear, but our bravery.” May it be so. Amen.

Benediction


Go forth into the world in peace.
Be of good courage.
Hold fast to that which is good
and render to no one evil for evil.
Strengthen the faint-hearted;
support the weak; help the afflicted.
Honor all people.
Love and serve God,
rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.
The grace of our Savior Jesus Christ be with us all.

Amen.