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Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him. The brothers of Joseph have it in for him and I understand how they feel, don't you? I mean, Joseph is hard to take

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. He's younger, he's spoiled, he's the apple of his father's eye because he's the first born son of Jacob's beloved Rachel. His brothers are born of lesser wives. He's a tattletale. He wears around

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that obnoxious long robe with sleeves, what we have come to call the coat of many colors, that is the emblem of his father's favor, and they hate him for it. Truth be known, it's

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pretty easy to understand why they hate him. Pretty hard to defend Joseph. Pretty hard to sympathize with Joseph. He's arrogant. He gets to stay home strutting around in that snazzy coat while his brothers are

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out in the fields working. It's always a matter of Joseph this and Joseph that, of course they hate him, he's insufferable. Joseph is insufferable for all kinds of reasons, but the dreams are what

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get to these brothers the most. They're so grandiose , so narcissistic and self-referential. One night he has a dream and he can't wait to tell his brothers about it. There we were, he says,

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binding sheaves in the field. Suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, then your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf. His brothers wonder amongst themselves, is that what we are little minions

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bowing down to this big shot? Are you indeed to reign over us? Are you indeed to have dominion over us? And Joseph's just sort of standing there polishing his fingernails. He has another dream The

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sun, the moon, the 11 stars. We're bowing down to me, he says. That's a dream that a number of us preachers have had too by the way. I mean, we're insufferable,

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we preachers. Uh, we see each other at a conference and somebody says, how's it going? And we can't wait to talk about all the things that have happened in our present context that make the

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point that were it not for us, the realm of God would be in serious trouble. The multiple services every Sunday, all of them packed, the new disciples coming in, the budget growth, the

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new enlarged parking garage. The educational square footage per child. How that place could have ever fallen into such a mess until we got there and now, well, it's a good thing we were born.

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Once, um In another community in which I served a church, there was a pastor whose ego entered the room 3 minutes before he did. He'd come in, strut around preening, showing off, fancy

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car, expensive suits. You couldn't stay in the room with him very long because there just wasn't enough oxygen for both of you. Somebody once saw him at a Presbytery meeting and pointed out. There but

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for the grace of God. Goes God It was Joseph's dream all over again. The sun, the moon. The 11 stars bowing down to him. And even Joseph's father Jacob doesn't indulge him on this

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one. What kind of dream is this that you have had? Shall we indeed come, I and your mother and brothers and bow to the ground before you. They don't like his dreams. I don't

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blame them. These days we know enough about dreams not to talk about them with just anybody. I'm married to a psychologist, but I don't talk to her about my dreams. I saved my dreams for

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my Jungian analyst, and even then I edited out anything having to do with snakes. I had a semester of psychology in college. I'm nobody's fool, we're such a therapized culture. We know that there

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are some dreams we just don't talk about. I have a regular anxiety dream. That 11+ years after leaving the parish to come here, I still have like clockwork on Saturday nights. I call them sacristy

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dreams. Uh, there was this room near the chancel in the church I served in Atlanta called the sacristy. It's where they kept the candlesticks and the silver and the periments and the robes they prepared the

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communion elements in that room. There was a mirror and ministers would put their robes on on in that sacristy and then go out to the service and I would dream these anxiety dreams on Saturday nights then and

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now about being. In the sacristy, preachers all over the world have dreams like this. Sometimes I'm back in the sacristy trying to get my robe buttoned up and the choir has already filed out and the

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service has begun, and there I am, I can't get the robe buttoned up. Or I'm doing fine with the robe and the choirs still in there waiting for me, waiting with me in the sacristy

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, but suddenly I remember that I've forgotten something. I was supposed to preach. I thought somebody else was doing that. It's my Sunday and I don't have a thing to say or maybe I'd be standing

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behind the pulpit and things are going well. I got in on time, the place is full and the choir has sung wonderfully and I'm preaching up a storm and people are taking it all in until suddenly

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I look down and realized that I'm completely naked. Saturday night Sacristy dreams. But I wouldn't dare tell just anybody about them. Joseph is not nearly so discreet, he just blabs it all around, his

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brothers hate him for it. One day his father sends him into the fields to see how his brothers are doing out there. Poor Joseph, he has to go out into the fields. Has to finish

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up his coke and potato chips in a hurry, has to get up off the couch, put the DVD on pause, put on his obnoxious coat, and saunter out there into the fields where his working

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, toiling, sweating brothers are. And when they see him come bopping over the horizon, something finally snaps. That happens in families. You suck it up for years all the injustice of a family system

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that is not fair, a family system that is a house of mirrors, a family system maybe that has repeated itself in your place of work even until one day you've had enough. That's what these brothers

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do they they snap. Here comes this dreamer, they say, come, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits. Then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him,

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and we shall see what will become of his dreams . So the dreamer steps out of the dream. And into a nightmare The good news is that his brothers managed to cool off and choose not to kill

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him. The bad news is they sell him into slavery. Or is it perhaps the case that this bad news is actually good news in some ultimate sense ? Now we're talking theology. And now we're talking

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about reading this story and reading life through the eyes of faith. This question about whether bad news can in fact become good news requires us to connect a long series of dots that cover a lot of a

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lifetime. It starts with what looks like tragedy. Midianite slave traders taking Joseph to Egypt and selling him to Egyptian army officer Potiphar, but Joseph does well in Potiphar's household and quickly becomes the chief supervisor of

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all of Potiphar's staff until in another turn of events Potiphar's wife tries to seduce him because after all he's awfully good looking and when he resists all her advances she sets him up as the aggressor and Joseph is

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suddenly thrown into prison. Tragedy morphs into good fortune which morphs back into tragedy, but Joseph, who has grown a lot, manages even in prison to land on his feet. Pharaoh discovers that he is

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a good interpreter of dreams and is so impressed with Joseph that he finally lifts him out of prison and places him in the#2 position in all of Egypt . And then when a famine, which he had

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predicted. Comes to pass and sweeps over the whole fertile crescent. Joseph's brothers eventually come to Egypt to plead for grain. They don't recognize Joseph now, of course, because he's older, probably even more

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dapper than he was in that obnoxious code of his childhood, but he recognizes them. And now he has the upper hand and the delicious opportunity to settle an old score. Remarkably though, he doesn't do

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that. He does put them through their paces, demands that next time they come back to Egypt, they are to bring Benjamin, the youngest brother, and then when that happens, seizes Benjamin as a

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slave, then tries his best to restrain his emotions as his brothers beg for Benjamin's release and then finally reveals himself to his brothers, puts them through their paces for sure, but finally he announces to them

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, not a vindictive word, not a command that they leave and never come back. But rather a testimony. About how he connects all the dots through the eyes of faith. From the start of this

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story to its conclusion, Joseph sees meaning in what has happened, even in his being sold into slavery , even in his being thrown into prison, even in his being brought through the ranks of a servile

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class structure, even though all the betrayal and deception happens, he sees nonetheless the hand of God. And at the end of the book of Genesis after Joseph's father Jacob and his household have been sent for

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and have settled into this new land and then in good time Jacob has died, Joseph assures his brothers once more, speaking as one who sees it all through the eyes of faith. Do not be afraid

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even though you intended to do harm to me. God intended it for good. Which was maybe Joseph's largest, most expansive dream of all, the dream that we all of us get a glimpse of through

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the eyes of faith. This dream does not waste time keeping an account of some well kept continually updated list of pains and betrayals. It enters instead into the pain of everyone, even the pain of your

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own betrayers until the dreamer of this large expansive dream is able to remember that before and beneath and beyond all the betrayals. They are, in fact, after all, finally, brothers and sisters and their

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pain too is shared and recognized by the whole world . What a redemptive dream. To see even in the midst of a family, a family that doesn't always tell the truth to one another, a family

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that keeps secrets and harbors and jealousies and brings grief and sorrow, a family that tears the heart and wounds the soul to see that even in the midst of that family. The deception and the hurt and

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the human frailty is watched over and tended by the unseen hand of God. What dream in the world ? He was more redemptive than that. A dream that sees the story of Joseph's family and knows that

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it's our story too. A dream that knows as well through the eyes of faith that most of all it is God's story. Do not be afraid. These words that ricochet throughout scripture, mainly on the

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lips of angels and messengers are words also which are uttered by Joseph the Dreamer. Do not be afraid , he says to his brothers, even though you intended to do harm to me. God intended it

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for good. We encounter that dream if we have the eyes to notice. In many places. In the life of the church. We're empowered to nourish such dreams because after, after all, we worship

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and we follow that dreamer who we know of as the hinge of history. The one who stared down death and showed us God's dream for our humanity lived to its fullest, God's dream for the completion of

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the world, and we know that to the extent that we've ever embraced his dream ourselves, it's because we have seen and heard and studied. And prayed to and walked with. Hi Oh sure. Members

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of his family too saw him coming and said, Here comes this dreamer. Come, let us slay him. But even their success at that. Has not hindered 2000 years later. Our preoccupation with him

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. And so we still brand ourselves. With his dream And we are dreamers too. Not that it's easy in these days. Not in this world, not in this culture, which so often laughs at

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and mocks our dreams. And yet still we can't take our eyes off that holy dream that we dream at our best. It's the dream of our family , maybe our nuclear family, maybe our extended family

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, families that are often biblical in the dimensions of both their tragedies and their hopes it's the dream of our churchly families too. Whatever our denominations are. That are often so wracked with exasperating division at the

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same time that they are capable of so stunning a faithful witness. It's the dream more and more these days as our world gets smaller before our very eyes of the family of God which we catch glimpses of

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from time to time when we discover that our little creeds can't contain everything perhaps that God desires to reveal to the whole world. It's the dream of this seminary. As we pause this morning to Inaugurate the

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tenure of a new board chair, a new board vice chair blessed with uncommon resources, an amazing board , a gifted faculty, voracious students, and enviable financial foundation upon which to build, we nourish still

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such bold dreams for this school. And the church of Jesus Christ that it serves. On so many levels we dare to dream. And not those self-absorbed dreams like those of Joseph at an earlier stage of

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his life. But rather the appropriately large and redemptive dream he captures and that captures him finally in the end. It's God's dream. And it's so big that it seeks to envelop all of us as fellow

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dreamers. And my question for us this morning is . With God's help Can we dream like that? With God's help in a church that feels more anxious than hopeful, can we nonetheless dream. With God's

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help in a world small enough to know about every tragedy in it as soon as we turn on CNN or Fox News or MSNBC, can we nonetheless dream ? With God's help in a culture in which it's

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hardly possible anymore to be civil with people with whom we disagree, can we nonetheless dream? With God's help, when dreaming is itself such a huge leap of faith, can we nonetheless dream or dare we

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dream at all? The story of Joseph, I think is fundamentally that of an expanding ever enlarging dream . The dream begins with what the world might look like from the standpoint of my own vision. But

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then by a grace that is bigger than any of us becomes over time a dream of what the world looks like when seen through the eyes of God. And the news I think today is that yes we

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can dream. Like that. We need dreams like that. Few weeks ago at our fall discovery weekend , a particularly interesting collection of inquirers spent the weekend with us, most of them young, most of

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them still in college. They went through the usual drill of discovery weekends Friday and Saturday, meet the faculty, meet students, go to classes, hear about financial aid, tour Austin. And then Saturday

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night they were at the manse for supper. And after supper, the group kind of settled in 2 or 3 different rooms and I had the privilege. Of being in the living room. When an amazing

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conversation broke out. Someone asked, what does the world in the 21st century most need to hear from the church? These inquirers, these college students began talking about the church that had formed them. And

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the church that is now being reformed. Tradition with a twist, house churches, mission oriented communities, liturgy and sacrament and attitude and community, community, community, everyone in that room. Was talking about

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a community big enough to have everybody at the table . On that weekend I had come just 6 days earlier from a church fight. And that dream that they spun together until everybody else in the house just

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instinctively gathered into that room and stood around the edge of it to listen that dream. Restored my hope for what we do here. We need dreams. Like that. Back in the late 1990s, a

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Texan named Lawrence Wright wrote his autobiography. I didn't know a thing about Larry Wright until I came to Texas, but he's a well known author, screenwriter , playwright. Now he writes for The New Yorker

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. His autobiography was called In the New World Growing Up with America, and he told of how during the Vietnam War he and his father were opposed to each other and in fact became enemies to one another

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. He told of how he and his father could not carry on a civil conversation. It got so bad. That Larry Wright stopped coming to Texas. And then he said Watergate happened and Nixon was thrown

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out. That's where this rift between father and son had been symbolically centered the struggle between his father who had supported Nixon and Larry Wright who had not indeed , Wright thought that Nixon was a scoundrel. Watergate

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had happened. Nixon was in the hospital with phlebitis near death, in shock, it seemed pneumonia had set in. Nixon was in critical condition both in October and November of that year. Larry Wright had

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not gone home for a long time, but he writes. I went back to Dallas for Thanksgiving dinner . For years My father and I had been enemies first because of the war and then because of Nixon

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. But now we looked at each other without anger once again. I saw what all this had done to him. The man he identified as my president in the way that people do who only expect to

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have one president in their lifetime who stands for what they stand for. Had shown himself to be a liar and a scoundrel. My father's judgment was shaken . He had defended Nixon for two decades, and

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he believed in him completely, but he realized now that he had been dreadfully wrong. In some unexpected , unlikely fashion. Watergate had made it possible for me to love my father again. I saw in

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him now an appealing humility which replaced the old bullying sense of certainty that part had been the Nixon part and it was gone. However, The Nixon part of me was still present, still rueful and petty

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and paranoid. And as my father carved the turkey . And my mother poured the wine. I offered a toast. To phlebitis, I said. Mother drew a breath and dropped her glass to the floor

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. My father stopped carving and looked at me. He lifted his glass and said No. To us To the family What a toast What a large redemptive dream. To us, to the family. To

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us, just us, the family of humankind, the family of the church, to us, third world and first world rich and poor haves and have nots, to just us, black and white and

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brown, conservative and liberal evangelical and moderate, high church and low church and maybe no church to us just the family of God. The family that Tickles the imagination of God, in fact. When God

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dreams. 2. In the name of God Creator