DREAM MAKING IN THE MIDST OF A DYSFUNCTIONAL WORLD
Part 1 of the Dream Maker Series
English Worship, Vietnamese Alliance Church at Midway City
June 5, 2005
Genesis 37:5 "Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more."
1) {DYSFUNCTION}
We all had some sort of dysfunctional background.
When I was growing up my dad had some serious illness with his kidneys and as a result my mom and dad slept on separate beds. And I always thought that was normal for husband and wife not to sleep together when their children are grown. Until I mentioned about that as I was dating Jenney, she said that was strange, because her mom and dad was still sleeping together.
But then I noticed that Jenney’s family had their strangeness as well. In one of our first dates, Jenney was calling home to inform her mom that she won’t be home for dinner; she was screaming on the phone, "Má ðó hả? Tối nay tui không về ãn cõm ðâu nghe!"[i] To me that was strange, “Are you always talking like that to your mom?” And she replied, “Yeah, that’s how we talk in our family.”
Some of you would probably laugh out loud, “Come’ on, Bumble – you called that dysfunctional? At least your parents are not control-freaks. Mine are. They have always had these big ambitions for me. They tell me what my career should be, who my friends should be, what kind of car I should drive, and who I should date. It’s like they expect me to be perfect but don’t really believe I can blow my own nose. I feel like I’m suffocating, but if I get the least bit independent, they would try to control me with money…”
And I am sure someone else can trump them, “That’s nothing! My dad was an alcoholic and very abusive. I was always afraid to invite other kids over because I didn’t want them to see what my family was like. I never really got close to people, now I don’t seem to know how to let others get close. I really don’t know how to have a good relationship. Most of the time I feel pretty alone”[ii]
Well, well, well – before we turn the whole things into a dysfunctional-bragging-fest. We need to acknowledge that dysfunctions are everywhere, even one of Time magazine journalist wrote, “Family dysfunction is now taken for granted, so the pressing question is what to do about it, and the prevailing answer is: just get over it”[iii].
But can you just “get over it”? Consider the family situation of a teenager I shall call Jay. Jay’s dad was a drifter. His dad was a con man, constantly on the move. He had two wives, and both of them were sisters. He also had two mistresses on the side, and ton of children from these relationships. Jay’s dad didn’t care much about the family[iv]. When Jay was 11 years old, his sister was raped in a town corner. His dad did nothing about it. So his older brothers plotted the revenge and killed a bunch of guys from that neighborhood and robbed them too[v]. That was the deal with the outside. On the inside the family was pretty messed up too. Jay’s real mom died when he was a kid. His dad’s getting old and his older brothers got worse with all sorts of troubles. The oldest brother even had an affair with his dad’s mistress. And the dad still did nothing about it. What a mess. And that was the dysfunctional background of Joseph in our text this week, Genesis 37.
Our text for today read that "Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more." (v.5) What was going on here? [Briefly retelling the story]
[Let’s pray...]
The Word of God speaks into our dysfunctional world today. He won’t say: just get over it, but He says: I know where you are in, and I will get you out of it, if you follow me!
Our story started (in v.2) when Joseph was seventeen-years-old, he was tending sheep with his older brothers, the sons of Jacob’s two concubines. He was already found himself in the middle of a dysfunctional family as I told you from the info of the previous chapters. Often, we don’t create our own dysfunctions, we just found ourselves in the middle of it.
But where our dysfunctions came from anyway?
In v.3 we can see some aspects of where Joseph’s dysfunctional background: favoritism and hatred.
i) His dad Jacob (aka Israel) clearly shows favoritism in the family. Joseph got a special coat, a tux from Nordstrom while the rest of the brothers got their jacket from Goodwill. Where this dysfunction came from? Favoritism was what Jacob grew up with. Remember his mom Rebecca loved Jacob, while his dad Isaac loved his brother Esau; and they were at war with each other fighting over whose favorite kid was supposed to get the inheritance?[vi]
ii) Favoritism breeds hatred. But hatred was also normalcy in this family also. Jacob had two wives. He loved Rachel but hated Leah[vii]. The attitude shown will be the attitude replicated! People often assume that their “private” sins hurt no one but themselves. For instance, how could the sin of envy affect anyone else? Isn’t greed strictly a matter between them and the Lord? But sins of character have a way of touching everyone with whom we have contact, especially those we love the most, our family.[viii]
We got dysfunctional when we inherit the sins from the previous generation as people learned to live with it.
The main problem with our dysfunctions is that we seldom know that we are dysfunctional! Just like my experience earlier, I would never know that our family was strange until Jenney told me; and she would probably never think twice about the way her family communicates until I told her. We grew up with our dysfunctions, we get used to function with those dysfunctions and therefore we thought that it’s normal!
{Illustration}[ix] A while ago, one of the girls in our college ministry team turned 21 and she was planning for her birthday party. She intended to invite only people who are 21 and over. When my wife saw the girl, she asked “Why?” and the girl explained, “Because I am now of legal age, so we will drink at the party for fun.” My wife the asked, “So, are we communicating that we need to have alcohol in order to have fun?” And the girl started to realize, “O, I haven’t thought about it that way. I just saw all my friends doing that. That makes sense.”
Friends, I am not here to condemn any specific problem. That’s not the focus of this Bible passage. What I want to point out is this: we all grew up in a dysfunctional world around us, most of the time we got used to it without even know. Like watching how love and dating portrayed on movies and TV, and we think casual dating for fun is normal. Like seeing many of our friends being rude and put down each others just for fun, and we think that’s just the ‘uniqueness’ of our church. Chances are you and I, we have even more dysfunctional things about ourselves that we didn’t even discover yet, because we thought it’s ‘normal’ and haven’t think about it much.
How do we even know about our dysfuctionalities? There are two mechanisms: one internal and one external. The first is that deep inside we still intuitively know right from wrong anyway.
i) Noticed what Joseph did when he was hanging out with his band of brothers: “he brought their father a bad report about them” (v.2). O, Joseph is a little snitch isn’t he? Before you jump to conclusion, note that v.3 explained that Joseph was daddy’s favorite not because he snitched on his brothers, but because Joseph had “been born to him in his old age”, especially since he and his baby brother Benjamin were the sons of Rachel, Jacob’s beloved and recently deceased wife. Because of that reason, we can’t conclude that Joseph was snitching on his brother, as like making up some bad report about them to earn brownie points with dad. It was true report of evil doing by his brothers.[x]
So what we see here is that somehow Joseph knew what’s right and what’s wrong, despite of bad examples and bad influences from staying with his wicked brothers. God gave everyone conscience, even if the whole world around us went on in its dysfunctional ways, we somehow instinctively knew what’s right and wrong. And that’s why many people of the world used alcohol and drugs to drown out the voice of their conscience so that they can enjoy the wrong things more freely. Without these substances, they would feel more guilty, because they knew what they did was wrong.
And keep on suppressing our conscience, and eventually it will choke and die, and we will no longer know any better when it comes to right and wrong. We will be as dysfunctional as anyone else in the dysfunctional environment around us.
ii) But our conscience could be deceived and drown out, so how do we know for sure? The second way to know what’s right or wrong is when God point them out to us.
God is doing that to us. He’s using His Word to talk about us about what’s right and wrong, and pointing out our dysfunctions. With the absolute standard of God’s Word, we cannot excuse for our dysfunctions, and called that a “unique feature” of our lives! On this standard, we begin to realize that we all have our quirks, our dysfunctional problems and need to be work on.
When the Bible point out our dysfunctional problems, it’s label them sin. At first, we might have thought that sins are the obvious bad deeds we produce. Lusting, stealing, cheating, cursing, etc. But then as we follow God, we will realize that sin also include our disobedience to God when we don’t live the way we should: loving, humility, sacrificing, even physical exercising more or engaging our minds more.
Without God, we would never know for sure that what we do is dysfunctional. But God is not just content to pointing our dysfunctional problems. He is also working to break us free from our dysfunction. God is dreaming about a better future for us.
2) {DREAM}
a) {Was it Joseph’s dream?}
v.5 said that “Joseph had a dream”. Was it really Joseph’s dream, or was it God’s dream of him? In the whole book of Genesis, every time there was a reference to dream, it meant a divine communication from God. From the dream of Jacob’s ladder to the dream of Pharaoh’s oxen, even the lesser known dream of the pagan king Abimelech or the dream of sheep-mating of Jacob.
God is dreaming about Joseph future, and Joseph was just happened to dream God’s dream. This is a divine dream, especially when this dream repeated twice. And the meaning of the dream was so clear that even his brothers and his father could explain it!
b) And God had a dream for you, too.
He is dreaming that you will be freed from the dysfunctional environment you are in, just like the sheaf which “stood upright” among the others. God is dreaming that your right-conducts would reign over all of other wrong-doings around you. God is dreaming that we will “be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved [us] and gave Himself up for us” [Eph. 5:1,2, NASB]
What is God’s dream for you? God is dreaming that you will be like Him! That’s why He gave us Jesus as a model to follow. Not only that, Jesus will also be there with us each step of the way to help us imitating Him. When you face your dysfunctional world, He won’t say “just get over it”, but He will empower you to breakthrough from that dysfunctional bondage!
So when you are finding yourselves in the midst of the dysfunctional world, the dysfunctional family, and even the dysfunctional church; don’t get used to the status quo of dysfunction around you. God doesn’t. God will not content to leave you there; He has something better in mind[xi]. He calls us out from that. He instills a vision, a dream once you know Him.
{Illustration}: Dennis share his story with me last summer. He too, was growing up in a tough situation. His dad was a rough man, and so he also grew up with roughness also. At 10 years old, he had already wanted to give up on everything going on in his life. Yet, in one of his Sunday School class, A. Tai was very encouraging to him. He said, “Hey Dennis, God made no mistake. He has a purpose for your life!” And that statement alone gave him hope and kept him going through the turbulent years of his teenage years. Dennis trusted in the dream God had for him.
Apparently Joseph believed in the dream enough that he talked about it. Twice! Even as he was already receiving some backlashes about it.
c) For every dream-maker, there will be many dream-haters.
His brothers hated Joseph for it. The hatred grew and accumulated to jealous envy, and jealousy lead to murder. Notice that the brothers’ motive to kill Joseph was to “see what comes of his dreams” [v.20b].
When we dream God’s dream, we will encounter plenty of negative reaction. People will mock us, they will hate us, they will label us as unrealistic dreamers, and they might even try to harm us to thwart the dream. After all, in a dysfunctional world, they would think that it’s normal to even kill people just out of jealousy!
Should we just shut up in the face of these dangers and just go back to dreaming?
No! Men dreams in their sleep, but God dreams through His actions. When we dream God’s dream, we must dream with determination.
3) {DETERMINATION}
The brothers were determined to terminate the dream by killing Joseph. But God was determined to make His dream come true in Joseph’s life. And so He saw Joseph through. First, He moved Reuben to convince the other guys not to kill Joseph, but shoved him down an empty well instead. Then God had Judah appeal to their greed and sold Joseph down to Egypt.
Andrew Lloyd Webber got it wrong in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat”. The main point of Joseph story is not “follow your dream”. The main point is “follow God’s dream!” Because when it’s God’s dream, He will see it through in our life. But what must we do on our part to follow God’s dream? There are three concrete examples from Joseph God wanted you to follow:
i) First, you need to break the cycle of dysfunction: Remember that Joseph did not remain in agreement when staying with his brothers? We all had some dysfunctional sins in our lives one way or another, most of the times we didn’t even know it because everyone else was doing it. But once God help us to know right from wrong, we will need to break the cycle of dysfunction. Speak up. If you cannot speak to human, then speak to God. Speak out even though it seems like nothing will change. At least you express your determination of not keep on propagating the same dysfunctional cycle.
ii) Second, you need to trust God in His dream for you, a future of deliverance. Many of you might also came from a severe dysfunctional background like that of Joseph. It doesn’t matter much to know where you come from – but it’s extremely important to know where you are going! See, knowing where you come from by looking at the past, and it only helps you to come up with excuses (My parents were alcoholic so I can’t help it but be an alcoholic). But knowing where you are going, by focusing on the goals God wants you to be, then you will make changes accordingly to get there.
iii) Third, you need to be persistent to be a dream maker: Shechem is 50 miles north of Joseph home, so when his father sent Joseph to look for his brothers “near Shechem”, he had every reason to come back home. (Well, I walked all the way here to Shechem, and they are not here, so I am done with what he sent me to do). Dothan is another 17 miles north from there. And Joseph was persistent in obeying his father, in concerning for the welfare of his brothers. Without that persistency, he won’t get mugged by his brothers. But without that persistency, he won’t be in Egypt and fulfill God’s dream for him either.
The Word of God speaks into our world today. He says: I know the dysfunctional background you have been in, and I have a better dream for you from now on. What is needed is your determination for this presence point. Do you determine to break your cycle? Do you determine to trust in my dream for you? Do you determine to be persistent in dream making?
What are your dysfunctions: sexual promiscuity, filthy practices, materialistic greed? How about the love of gossip, dirty language, or silly drunkenness? [Eph.5:3-4,18] Will you break the cycle or will you repeat the same cycle? Will you trust what God’s call you to? Will you persistent in following God?
Remember: First, you need to break the cycle of dysfunction: Second, you need to trust God in His dream for you: a future of deliverance. Third, you need to be persistent to be a dream maker.[xiii]
As we take communion today, may God point out the mess you have been in and the promise He has in store for you. Be a dream maker, don’t just merely be a dreamer!
For reference notes, formatted text and comments, please go to
http://i12know1stdraft.blogspot.com/2005/06/dream-making-in-midst-of-dysfunctional.html#comments
You can also leave a message there to request for the accompanied PowerPoint slide.
