He Said, She Said (Genesis 39:1-23; Pentecost 16; September 21, 2014)

He Said, She Said

Genesis 39:1-23
Pent 16
September 21, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Joseph always seems to land on his feet.  He has an undeserved place of privilege in his father’s house.  When his brothers sell him into slavery to a trader going to Egypt, Joseph is sold to an upper class Egyptian named Potiphar.  In Potiphar’s house, Joseph rises quickly through the ranks of the slaves until he is running the household.  Accused of attempted sexual assault, Joseph is thrown into jail where, once again, he quickly becomes a sort of assistant warden. 

Joseph’s luck doesn’t end with the end of our reading.  Joseph had interpreted the dreams of a couple of his fellow-prisoners, Pharaoh’s chief baker and chief cup-bearer.  Joseph understands their dreams to be predictions of their immediate fates.  The chief baker will be executed.  The chief cup-bearer will be restored to his position.  And so it happens.  Joseph asks the cup-bearer to plead his case before Pharaoh, but, understandably, the cup-bearer wants to put this episode as far behind him as he can and “forgets” Joseph. 

He fails to remember Joseph until, that is, Pharaoh himself has a two disturbing dreams that no one is able to interpret.  Then the cup-bearer remembers Joseph the dreamer still languishing in prison.  Pharaoh summons Joseph, hears the interpretation of the dreams, and appoints Joseph the head of the Royal Emergency Management Agency, REMA, and orders him to prepare for the famine that Pharaoh’s dreams have predicted.

From favored son, to the pit, to Potiphar’s butler, to prison, to Pharaoh’s prime minister: no matter what happens to Joseph, he is golden.  He is the Teflon patriarch: nothing ever sticks to him.

The story of Joseph is a long one.  Genesis gives nearly as much ink to Joseph as it does to Abraham.  The Joseph story is pivotal.  Before it come the stories of the wandering patriarchs and the family drama that seeps from one generation to the next.  After his story comes the life of the covenant people of God as they are rescued from slavery in Egypt, accompanied through the wilderness, and brought into the land of promise. 

In between stands Joseph who brings his whole family to the land of Egypt where they get relief from the famine that grips the region.  Joseph also presides over a great power grab as he, in Pharaoh’s name, sells the stockpiled grain that people needed in order to survive.  He sold it to the people first for money and then, when their money ran out, for their livestock, land and even their persons.  The people of Egypt (and his own family) survived the years of drought and famine, but ended them as slaves to Pharaoh.  Joseph, as it turned out, caused the very condition of his own people from which Moses had to deliver them. 

Yet, somehow God worked through this very flawed man to create a path forward for the people of Israel.  In spite of Joseph’s self-seeking—and his story is filled with self-seeking—God works through him to do good for God’s people.

After that, of course, it would be easy to say that Joseph’s story tells us that God will work through us as well, in spite of our faults and short-comings, so that God’s purposes are achieved, as often in spite of us as because of us, but achieved nonetheless.  And then we could all go down to the Ministry Fair where you would be amazed at all the things that God is doing in our midst and be moved to add your efforts to one or more of the ministries.  And this would make Linda Watson, our Administrative Council Chairperson, very happy.And me, too.

I was all set to go this way, when the second video of former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice surfaced, this time of the assault that took place in the elevator as he punched his then-fiancé now-wife Janay Palmer in the head.  The blogosphere has been lit up since with accusations, excuses and attempts to spin the events.  Rice had been suspended for two games but in response to the public reaction that has been changed to an indefinite suspension.  There are calls for the resignation of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.  Janay Palmer Rice’s battered body has become not only a crime scene, but also the battleground for another skirmish in the on-going gender wars. We haven’t heard the last of this episode.  And I hope that we do not.

I have followed this news through the lens of the Joseph story, or perhaps I have read the Joseph story through the lens of domestic violence.  What I see that they have in common is that the central question in both of them is, “Whose story gets believed?”

At the center of this episode in Joseph’s story are two accounts of what happened.  The accounts only agree that there was an attempted sexual assault and that Joseph and Potiphar’s wife were involved.  The account of Potiphar’s wife—notice that she is not named and that gives us a clue as to the sympathies of the narrator—is that Joseph took advantage of the access that his position in the household gave him to attempt to rape her and fled, leaving his garment behind, when she screamed.

The other account—note that it is the narrator’s account, not Joseph’s—is startlingly different.  In that account Joseph is presented as physically attractive—“well-built and handsome,” I believe is how the text describes him.  Potiphar’s wife becomes attracted to him and makes repeated attempts to seduce him.  Finally, when the house is empty she grabs him by his clothing and tries to drag him into bed.  Joseph flees with his virtue, but without his garment.

Potiphar, for his part, seems unable to make up his mind.  In those days, imprisonment was not a punishment—it was where people awaiting judgment were kept until their cases were decided.  In Joseph’s case this was more than two years.  What was Potiphar waiting for?

He said, she said.  But who is believed?  Something happened.  She says that it was an assault, an attempt to gain unwanted access to her body.  The narrator goes to work right away, not to find out what happened, but to deprive her testimony of its force.  He was handsome.  She wanted him.  She tried to seduce him.  Then she made damaging accusations against him.  I don’t know what happened inside the bedroom of Potiphar’s wife.  I do know that, whatever happened, the narrator has left behind the traces of a cover-up, as if this were a press release from Roger Goodell’s office.

This story is all-too familiar.  It is played out in and out of the public eye thousands of times every year in homes, offices, restaurant back rooms, government halls, high schools, universities, military camps, and, yes, even in churches from Steubenville, Ohio, to base camps in Afghanistan.  And always it comes down to, “Who gets to tell the story?  Who is believed?  Who gets to decide who is telling the truth and what is their interest?”

One in five women who attend a four-year college will be raped.  If they file a complaint almost universally they will face a second assault from the disciplinary process of their college or university.  Universities, like Army company commanders, have a vested interest in finding that no assault took place, that her version of the story is a misunderstanding, or a vindictive cover-up for her own bad decisions.

A student at Columbia University, Emma Sulkowicz, was raped by a fellow student in her dorm room in the fall of 2012.  She delayed reporting it until she talked with two other students who had been raped by the same man.  Several months after she reported the rape,the university held a hearing at which it dismissed the case.  The other two cases were also dismissed.  There is a serial rapist at Columbia University. 

Emma stayed at Columbia, suffering from some of the array of symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder typically experienced by rape survivors.  Emma is an art major.  This summer she developed a plan for her senior art project.  It would be a performance art project, or, as she calls it, “an endurance art project.”  This semester it began.  She is carrying (or more accurately, dragging) her mattress everywhere she goes: to the bathroom, to the dining room, to her classes, to the library, to her studio, everywhere.  She will do it, she says, until she graduates or her rapist leaves campus.  She is doing it for herself, and for other survivors, and maybe even for Potiphar’s wife.

Whose story is believed?  What does it take for the one whose story is not believed to get a hearing?  What does it take for those charged with providing a safe place to learn or work or live to do as they are supposed to do?  These are all questions that this story raised for me, questions that derailed my plans and made it impossible to treat it as a familiar story with a comfortable moral we can take with us.

I cherish this book and its memories, its dreams and visions and, above all, its stories.  We need every one of them.  But I take them far too seriously to swallow them whole.  I find that when I, in the words of the old collect, “read, mark and inwardly digest them,” there are bits and can't be digested. 

The Bible has authority not because it is infallible or inerrant but because in it the people of God remember and wrestle with the meaning of their experience.  That wrestling has left its traces in the text that we have in our hands and it authorizes our wrestling.  Sometimes that wrestling yields a blessing as it did for Jacob at Peniel by the ford of the Jabbok.  Sometimes that wrestling so frightens us that we run from the room, leaving our garment behind.  Whenever we open the covers of this book, we risk either outcome, and that is a core part of what it means to be the people of God.

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