I returned last week from my annual July vacation break. As some of you know, Al and I have been vacationing in the Lot Et Garonne – Dordogne Departments of SW France for many years. It’s a region of Bastides – villages and small towns whose fortifications date back to the 100-years war between England and France that raged approximately between 1337 and 1453. This is region of rolling vineyards producing the classic Bordeaux wines, although more locally, Duras and Bergerac have their own wine appellations. The wines of the SouthWest became the staple of the English they named gave them the generic name of Claret. The region is also the heartland of French Rugby. To gain a flavor of this region I recommend Martin Walker’s novels featuring Bruno Chef de Police. Although Southern Europe experienced an unprecedented heatwave this July, the misdirected flow of the Gulf Stream resulted in this region experiencing the coolest July we can remember.

During my month away each year I try to read something substantial and was pleased to be able to complete Tuck Shattuck’s recently published history of Episcopal-Anglican missionary activity in Palestine between 1850 and 1950. I also had time to listen to numerous Tom Holland podcasts.

Tom Holland is a renowned historian of the Classical period. A much-published writer and speaker and host of his own podcast The Rest is History. His book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind is of particular interest. In it he explores how the revolutionary impact of Christianity completely remade the ancient world with profound reverberations that have continued into our own age.

Holland has some interesting thoughts on Western Secularism which he sees as the child of the Christian revolution. He notes that pews may be emptying and the institution of the Church fading, yet Western Secularism continues to preserve the Christian revolution despite most secularists’ overt hostility towards conventional theistic Christianity.

Love, equity, justice, the protection of the rights of the individual, freedom of expression, the championing of justice for the oppressed – are among the principles Western Secularism claims – as the US Constitution states – to be truths that are simply self-evident. Secularists seem to assume these self evident truths exist in rational vacuum awaiting discovery in the Enlightenment. Yet, as Holland points out these values are nowhere to be found in historical societies not shaped by the Christian revolution. What secularists discern as self-evident truths- those for instance enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights – are the legacy of the fact that like fish in water we are all, people of faith as well as secularists, swimming in the same Christian sea.

What distinguishes Christians from Western Secularists is not values or principles but simply that for Christians the active presence of the mind and hand of God remains discernable to us in the flow of events in the world around us.

Yet, the immediate difficulty for people with a Christian faith story is how do we arcuately discern the presence of the mind and hand of God in the flow of daily events. The simple yet problematic answer is we look to the Bible.

However, the problem is how do we distinguish between the mind and hand of God and the influences of our minds and hands. Can the Bible be a conduit for discerning the mind and hand of God’s activity unsullied by our own projections? The power of text lies not in what the text says – that is – the plain meaning of the words on the page – but in what can be read into it. The temptation for both conservative and progressive Christians alike is to project into the biblical texts a reflection of each’s culturally conditioned priorities, hopes, and fears and assume they are evidence for the mind and hand of God.

The reality shrouded by the contested heat of biblical interpretation is that the biblical witness still matters for progressives as much as conservatives. At the heart of contested interpretation lies an area of commonality – a mutual recognition that the function of the biblical witness is not to confirm but to disturb. The Bible functions not so much to affirm or align with our projections but to confront us with what we refuse to see. The mind and hand of God’s activity in the world is one of judgement – calling us to repentance for the willful conflation of our priorities and self-interests as if they are that same as those of the mind and hand of God.

Since Pentecost we’ve been journeying through the significant story lines in the Book of Genesis. On the 14^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, we arrive at the story of Joseph – the final epic story cycle in Genesis.

The date of Genesis’ compilation as a written text is still debated, but consensus favors sometime between the 7^th– 6^th centuries BCE by a group of scribes known as the Deuteronomists. 200 hundred years later, the Deuteronomic corpus received a complete editorial makeover during the Exile between 585 and 457 BCE – leaving us with the Torah pretty much in its present form.

Genesis contains two grand narrative sweeps. It begins with a sweep from creation through the fall, the flood, and assorted events leading up to the arrival on the scene of a man called Abraham. The second great sweep chronicles events in the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and finally Joseph – men collectively known as the Patriarchs. Whereas Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph have their own extensive narrative cycles, Isaac gets short shrift – appearing only through his relationships and never in his own right. He is Abraham’s son, Rebekah’s husband, Jacob and Esau’s father. Isaac’s main function for the Deuteronomic compilers of Genesis is that he is the procreative link allowing them to conflate independent patriarch traditions into a contiguous narrative through the fiction of kinship – father, son, grandson, and great-grandson -connecting Abraham to Jacob and beyond to Joseph.

The Joseph cycle brings Genesis’ grand story of origins to a close. The book of Exodus opens with the list of Jacob’s eleven sons before reporting the death of the 12^th son, Joseph. After the deaths of all the patriarchs, the Hebrews continue to flourish and multiply in the land of Goshen. However, a significant shift in tone occurs at verse 8 which simply begins with the ominous words: Now a new king arose in Egypt who did not know Joseph. These words – so full of import become the preamble to the enslavement of the Hebrews – setting the stage for the next act in the Israel’s epic story – Moses and the Exodus.

The OT reading for next Sunday continues Joseph’s remarkable story – details which we will pick up then. So stay tuned.