Genesis 50:1-14, 22-26
August 24, 2008
The Embalming of Jacob

          As a kid I was frequently bubbling with energy.  But, as I’m sure you can imagine exuberant personalities can become bothersome at times and my incessant talking wasn’t always appealing to some of my teachers, like Mrs. Kornfuhrer, who taught me in the third and fifth grades.  I remember well that my outbursts of answers and remarks became so prolific at times that Mrs. Kornfuhrer needed to give me special directions when I wanted to speak in class. 

The instructions were pretty simple, though somewhat embarrassing at times.  And they went something like this:  Every time I raised my hand in class, Mrs. Kornfuhrer would give me “the look” which meant I had to put my hand down and ask myself silently these questions: “Is what I want to say relevant? Is what I want to say appropriate? And does what I want to say make other people feel good?”  It is a rather useful practice for me even today.

          So with the frenetic energy I had as a child, I can imagine that my parents and teachers were overjoyed during my moments of calm concentration.  And these moments often came as I diligently studied the world of Child Craft—the children’s encyclopedia I’m sure many of you are familiar with.  Dinosaurs!  Space!  Underwater!  Worlds upon worlds of wonderful information to explore. 

And second only to my fascination with dinosaurs—especially the peaceful plant-chomping Brontosaurus—I was also curiously interested in Ancient Egypt.  A world culturally distinct with awesomely cool practices that kids like me love to learn about—like embalming, where all the organs of a person are removed and carefully stored in little jars and where the brain is extracted from the deceased person’s head via a hook being inserted through the nostril.  The grotesque was pure fascination for me!

          So with this knowledge, perhaps you can imagine both my surprise and giddiness when I read through our passage for today in Genesis.  There is Egyptian embalming in the Bible!  And not only that, the Israelite leaders—Jacob and Joseph—are the ones being embalmed!  This close connection with a culture outside traditional Israelite practice had me wondering all week, why would Jacob and Joseph undergo this procedure to preserve their remains—a procedure with specific ties not only to a culture different than theirs, but one tied directly to religious practices of Egyptian, not Israelite culture.  But perhaps this question of why is not as important as the simple fact that Jacob and Joseph were embalmed.

          I think one thing that makes this story at the very end of the book of Genesis so remarkable is the fact that frequently our dominant view of Egypt in the Bible is based on the book of Exodus, not Genesis.  In Exodus we are told that a new pharaoh comes to power who does not know Joseph and he instills fear in his people that the Israelites are too numerous and will become too powerful.  Enslavement and fear are the only answers this new pharaoh provides to the issue of an immigrant Israelite minorite.

          However, the book of Genesis portrays Egypt, not as a place of fear and enslavement, but as a place of refuge.  Joseph rises from servant to advisor to the king.  Jacob and all his family seek refuge in Egypt from the famine in their own land.  They are immigrants.  They are aliens.  They are foreigners.  But they are not despised!  Pharaoh, through the guidance of Joseph provides for those fleeing economic and social problems in their own homeland.

          But more than simple provision happens in our narrative today.  The Egyptians, the superpower during this time, and the Israelites, the immigrants, foreigners and aliens, share culture with each other in ways of mutuality and love.  The Israelite immigrants are not feared for their cultural distinctiveness and the Egyptians do not impose their own dominant culture upon the Israelites.  There is mutual sharing, mutual learning, mutual uplifting.

          Joseph is the shining example of this cultural mingling.  Joseph, in fact becomes almost entirely Egyptianized.   We are told in Chapter 41 that he is given an Egyptian name: Zaphenath-paneah, which can mean “Sustainer of Life.”  Joseph marries the daughter of an Egyptian religious priest—Asenath.  He wears Egyptian linen and gold chains.  And he wears upon his hand the ring of the Egyptian pharaoh.  And he is the father of two children with his Egyptian wife—Manasseh and Ephraim.  His family is ethnically, spiritually, and culturally mixed with his two half-Egyptian, half-Israelite children growing up to be the father of two Israelite tribes.  Joseph’s family is one that mixes immigrant and native freely and wholesomely. 

          So is it any wonder that Joseph requested embalming for his father?  Or that Joseph himself was embalmed by others after his death?  For Joseph, the former slave, and for Jacob, the immigrant, Egypt was their refuge.  It was their hope from troubled times.  It was a place where the people were generous to them and treated them fairly.

          But the sharing of culture, the mingling of nations was not just on the Israelite end.  We are told in our passage today that Joseph requests that Pharaoh allow him to bury his father Jacob in their homeland.  Pharaoh quickly agrees with this, and not only agrees, but sends “all the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his household, and all the elders of the land of Egypt” with Joseph’s family in the funeral procession to Canaan.  Genesis tells us simply that “it was a very great company.”  Can you imagine this event in today’s terms?  It is as if the President of the United States sent his entire cabinet and the influential people the administration to another country for the burial of a simple immigrant father of a former slave.

          So, to summarize this rather unique series of events, Jacob is first embalmed in the cultural and religious tradition of Egypt, which takes 70 days.  Then both Egyptians and Israelites, mourning the loss of Jacob, walk for weeks, together, to the homeland of Joseph and Jacob.  Then they bury Jacob in the cultural and religious tradition of his family and faith, observing 7 days of mourning.  There is respect in this story for both the native Egpytian and immigrant Israelite culture.

And very significantly, the author tells us that when Jacob is buried in the land of Canaan, that, and I quote “when the [native] Canaanite inhabitants of the land saw the mourning on the threshing floor of Atad, they said, ‘This is a grievous mourning on the part of the Egyptians.”  This cross-cultural care and concern, between the nation of Egypt and the immigrants of Joseph’s family, was so intimate, so emotional, so passionate that neutral bystanders were amazed that the Egyptians and the Israelites cared so much for each other.  It is an astounding description of an amazing event.

But astounding descriptions of amazing events are not limited to history, as the Olympic Games in Beijing that are just finishing up have similar stories.  Perhaps you’ve heard of the American flag bearer at these Olympics.  Lopez Lomong—a former Lost Boy from Sudan.  One of only about 27,000 young children who escaped death during a 20 year Sudanese war.   A boy who came to the United States only in 2001 and only became a citizen one year ago, hoisting the flag for a country and culture different than one he was born into.

And what of the remarkable story of Henry Cejudo, the American wrestler who won gold in freestyle wrestling.  Henry is the son of undocumented migrants from Mexico, who was raised by a single mother who took whatever jobs she could find, from janitor to construction worker, to provide for her five children.  Henry’s is a story born from years of poverty and pain, but a story that ends with a pure release of joy and thankfulness from those who suffered too long and too hard.  As the New York Times put it: “After Cejudo had defeated Tomohiro Matsunaga of Japan to win the 121-pound freestyle wrestling final on Tuesday, and after his family members had celebrated so loudly for so long that security threatened to kick them out, officials hung a gold medal around his neck. He said he might never remove it.

"I'm proud of my Mexican heritage," Cejudo said. "But I'm an American.”   Cejudo’s story is a mixing of culture.  One where the defining and distinctive lines of country, of history, of ethnicity, are blurred by appreciating the commonalities and similarities of our life together in a multi-ethnic world.

But much of the difficulty in living life together is not found in the remarkable stories of life, but in the mundane and daily existence of unremarkable people.  People not blessed with stupendous athletic talent or coming from situations racked with the violence of warfare.  How do we learn to live our Christian faith in the ordinary situations of cultural diversity that we find in our own backyards? 

One of my favorite memories from my time in Chicago was driving to Midway Airport on the Southside.  Because as you rode on 55th Street Bus you passed first from a mixed neighborhood, to a black neighborhood and finally through a Hispanic neighborhood.  It was a drive that showcased both ethnic and religious distinctiveness as well as cultures that overlapped and merged with one another.  It was a drive of diversity that I thought I would miss when I moved to Richmond.

But as I soon found out when I moved here to Richmond, driving down Hull Street Road toward the city is a similar experience.  And, like the Egyptians and the family of Joseph in our story today, can we can see the beauty of distinctive cultures—white, Hispanic, black, mixed—in our own neighborhoods and city today?  Can we appreciate the aspects of our own ethnicities, our own backgrounds while at the same time seeking to understand and appreciate others?  Can we see that God’s love, God’s renewing Spirit, God’s good will for the whole world is not bound by national lines, it is not contained by ethnic distinctiveness, it is not formulated or constructed by the divisions of humanity.  But by God’s good grace and God’s good love is found among and between all peoples of this world. 

And no where is this more clear than in the person of Jacob who was embalmed in Egypt, buried in Canaan, but celebrated, mourned, indeed loved and cared for equally by people of both cultures.  And is it possible then, that we can do that very same celebrating, the very same mourning, the very same loving of the diversity and beauty of God’s life on Hull Street Road?  Amen.

 

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lopez_Lomong  --  accessed August 21, 2008