Gender play with Joseph
A reflection on being who you are and expanding how you see
Trigger warning: In this reflection there is brief mention of a sexual assault that occurs in one of the biblical narratives that I reference.
Just a few weeks left in this journey of reflections on the legends and myths in the book of Genesis.
In case you need to get reoriented, here’s where we’ve been so far: We talked about the delight of the creative force that pulses beneath // within // throughout all the rest. And about Eve and Adam and their move east of ignorance and innocence. About Cain and his motherful God. Noah and the arkfuls we all contain. The tower and the tongues. The legends of Abraham. Melchizedek’s picnic. Hagar’s name for God. Rebekah’s clash of twins within. And Jacob the God-wrestler.
Today we turn our attention toward Joseph, seeking what the stories of his life might have to teach us about the living of ours.
I’ll go ahead and give you my conclusion right out of the gate: The most powerful thing about Joseph is how he went about being himself in a context that did not accept who he was.
Joseph did not conform to the cultural expectations of the world he was born into.
There are a couple of ways that this sort of thing can go down. There are those who are non-conformists for the sake of being non-conformists. They buck the system because they enjoy being against something. They identify primarily with what they are not.
And, you know, to each their own. That’s fine, to a point.
But it is not a particularly creative way of being.
There are, however, those who do not conform to the world because they are precisely attuned to being authentically themselves regardless of whether or not the world is wired to receive them.
There is a particular form of power in those expressions of authenticity. And that’s what I intend to look at today.
When I was in seminary in Chicago, a couple nights every week I would make my way to a Lutheran church in the city where there was one big room in the basement.
We would open the door each night and invite in 20 guests for a hot meal in that big room. After cleaning up from supper we would transform the big room into a dance floor and our guests would dance and laugh and play. Then, around 11pm, we’d turn off the music, pull out 20 mattresses and clean bedding from the storage closet, dim the lights, and give our guests a safe place to sleep for the night.
In the morning we served them breakfast and they headed back out to the streets. Then we’d do laundry, and prepare for another night.
This church basement shelter initiative was called The Crib, named by the guests who regularly stayed with us. All of our guests were somewhere in the range of 18-24 years old. We served that particular youth population because we had found that there were a lot of young people who were not welcome in their homes, and who did not have a safe place to go and be themselves.
Most of our guests were LGBTQ youth whose experience of homelessness was directly tied to having been ostracised from their home communities because their sexual orientation or their gender identities did not conform to what was expected of them by their families.
The Crib was developed specifically to be a safe space for LGBTQ youth who had aged out of the adolescent shelter system. A space that extended beyond one of simple welcome. It was a space, instead, that actively celebrated who they were and how they identified and expressed themselves, because we recognized that our world needed them to be entirely themselves.
Many of my co-workers at The Crib also identified as LGBTQ, and in their company I learned a lot about and from identities and experiences that were different from my own as a straight man whose gender matches the sex that the hospital put on my birth certificate when I was born—as a person whose identity conforms to most of our cultural norms.
And I just want to say that, if you are also a straight, cis-gendered person, like me, and you are curious about how to relate with and gracefully navigate differences across lines of gender identity and sexual orientation—I would be so happy to talk with you more, and resource you, and meet your curiosity and questions without any judgement.
Because doing that work of understanding is vital to creating a culture that extends beyond welcome, into a joyous celebration of diversity and nonconformity.
One radical way to actively celebrate queerness is to learn to see it in our sacred texts.
In the story of Joseph, for example.
As we’ve discovered during our journey through Genesis, a lot of characters in the bible are not particularly good role models. Bible stories don’t always cast them in the best light (which I love about my particular sacred text).
But Joseph is pretty solid.
Perhaps the worst thing that could be said about Joseph—at least at the outset of his stories, in Genesis 37—is that he was precocious and annoying as a kid.
I mean, come on bud, if you’re having those kinds of dreams—where the rest of your family is bowing down to you—maybe don’t get carried away with telling about them all the time.
And if you do happen to be your father’s favorite child, maybe don’t go rubbing it in to your older brothers by always wearing the special outfit that he gave you.
But then again, don’t you kind of love Joseph? There’s a sort of wide-eyed innocence to how he carries himself.
And about that special outfit, the one that you probably know about as Joseph’s coat of many colors, or—for the Andrew Lloyd Webber fans among us—as Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat: There’s an interesting bit of Hebrew bible interpretation work that I learned from my friend, Peterson Toscano, who is an incredible bible scholar and story-teller (see especially his play Transfigurations, about transgressing gender in the bible)...
The Hebrew term for that outfit that Jacob gives to Joseph is ketonet passim.
And it has been translated in many different ways—“coat of many colors” in the King James Version which is perhaps most culturally familiar; or as an ornamented garment; or as a special long-sleeved, full-length, royal tunic.
Ketonet passim is not a common phrase in the Hebrew bible, so mainstream scholars have long questioned what exactly this garment is.
But there is one other place that this phrase is used in the Hebrew bible, and if we’re looking for hints as to what a ketonet passim is, then it behooves us to look at the one other usage of the phrase.
In II Samuel 13 there’s a very tragic story about the Israelite princess Tamar, the daughter of King David. In the story, Tamar is sexually assaulted by her half-brother, and in her grief in the aftermath of her experience of being raped she rips her garment. And we’re told in that passage that the ornate garment she is wearing is the garment that the virgin daughters of kings wear—ketonet passim.
In other words: It’s a princess dress.
This is the kind of garment that Jacob gives to Joseph, and that Joseph loves to wear as he moves about among the camps telling his older brothers about his dreams. Joseph wears his regal, ornamented, gender-bending garment as he moves through his small world with the courage to share his visions, being open and vulnerable. Playful, even. Wide-eyed and fascinated by life.
In Genesis chapter 37, we hear how Joseph’s brothers can’t handle the ways that he moves through the world. So his brothers scheme up a way to get rid of him, to banish him from the family.
If we were to continue reading his story (or if we tuned into all of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical) we would see that, through the alchemy of divine intervention, personal resilience, and some good old fashioned luck Joseph ends up landing in situations where being himself actually serves to lift him up out of the pits that he gets put in by other people’s fears, opinions, and insecurities.
Joseph remains true to his insight and experience right on through. And he becomes the hero of his story in the process, and along the way he helps to alleviate a lot of suffering in his world.
But that’s all a story for another day.
Today I am curious about Joseph’s brothers: What is it that threatens them about Joseph?
We know from a close sociological and psychotherapeutic look at masculinity, that unhealthy outbursts of aggression by men often come from personal insecurities about their own identity.
I saw this sometimes at The Crib, the shelter that was designed to be a safe space for people to explore and express themselves fully. Sometimes the insecurities of unhealthy masculinity snuck through our intake process, and came out as verbal threats of violence, most often directed at the transgender women in the space.
We did our best to prevent these behaviors, and to remove the perpetrators when needed. But it happened sometimes, because unfortunately this is a common occurrence in our world, where masculinity—which is a sacred source of life—is expressed in perversions of unhealthy aggression. People in powerful positions of privilege, who have not fully accepted and integrated who they are in their own hearts, lash out against those whose visions for life challenge or confound their own limited visions.
So what were the particular insecurities and limitations of Joseph’s brothers?
It’s hard to say. There were ten older brothers, and I’d wager that there were at least that many distinct forms of insecurity.
“What is it that threatens the brothers?” is an interesting question.
But an even more interesting question is this: What is it that Joseph has to offer?
As the story continues he has a lot to offer: Truthful feedback to those who seek it, outside the box thinking that saves a region during climate catastrophe, generosity of spirit by which he forgives his brothers and reconciles his family, generosity with his wealth to support his family and contribute possibility to the continuation of his ancestor’s legacy.
Joseph has a lot to offer. The most powerful thing about Joseph is how he goes about being himself in a context that does not accept who he is. Until he finds himself and grows himself in a context that embraces who he is. Then he saves the world.
At the congregation that I serve on the coast of Maine we have a statement that informs our practice of being an Open and Affirming church, which goes like this: “We acknowledge and affirm the equal value of people of all ages, races, nationalities, ethnicities, cultures, sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, regardless of physical, mental, or emotional abilities, family structures, faith backgrounds, or social or economic circumstances. We believe that all people are created in the image of God…”
Orienting toward that statement always raises a practical question for me: What becomes possible when we truly live that out?
When we look for the ways that Joseph contributes to our community, what becomes possible? Even and especially when it means reconsidering what we consider normal.
When we look for the ways that the Joseph-within-us-all might contribute to our community, what becomes possible?
Because regardless of whether or not you identify as LGBTQ, I’d wager that there are ways that you—when you are being entirely yourself—challenge the cultural habits that need challenging as we collectively build a better world.
Some of us identify more with Joseph in the story, forging a path of self-expression and vision that sometimes makes other people uncomfortable even though it is authentic and truthful and powerful.
In listening to the Joseph story we honor your power and praise your courage.
And hear this: It’s not your responsibility to save us in a world falling apart, but we acknowledge that we deeply need you.
If this is you, if you relate in any way, then I ask you: What is the many-colored coat—the princess dress—that you’ve been told to hide? What might you be holding back that your community actually needs? And, perhaps most importantly, what support and celebration do you need in order to courageously offer it?
Many of us—if we’re being honest—identify more with Joseph’s brothers in the story.
We are comfortable with the way that things are. We do not welcome changes to the status quo. We feel personally threatened by the boldness of others when they express who they are in ways that confuse us or call on us to expand our understanding.
So I ask: What might it have been like if Joseph’s brothers—instead of collapsing into the base impulses of their own insecurities—delighted in all that Joseph had to offer to the family? What might it have been like if his brothers collaborated with his vision? If they were self-possessed, self-assured enough to see the boy who was coming into his strengths and to champion his becoming?
Whether you are Joseph, or whether you’re his brothers, or—as is likely the case—if you are some combination of both: Let’s put our imaginations to work today.
How about we each—ever more fully—bring our authentic selves to our communities?
And let’s all delight in and celebrate the fullness of every beloved, fabulous, courageous, vital child of God in our midst.
Can I get an AMEN?
AMEN!