Some time ago, a man I barely knew named Reuben made an appointment and came to see me in my office.

“I’d like to talk about something that happened in my family,” he said.

Well, not so fast. No priest or therapist worth his or her salt would look at one generation of family in isolation. You have to look at the whole family system, take a history, to really understand where family traits come from. So, after we chatted a bit, I said, “It might help me if I can get a history of your family to look at where it’s healthy and where it’s not. Could you tell me a bit about your family?”

“Sure, he said. I’ll start with my great-grandfather, Abraham.”

And then, he matter-of-factly told the story of his family:

“Well,” he said, “Grandpa Abraham followed a ridiculous dream and left his homeland because God told him he would have land, be the father of a great nation, and be an inspiration to the other nations. (There has actually been a lot of pressure on all of us to fulfill this prophecy.) Anyway, the problem was, Grandpa Abraham was old, and so was his wife, Grandma Sarah, and they didn’t have any kids. Well, Abraham went to Egypt to get food during a famine, but Sarah was a real looker (we have a history of picking real babes in my family), and Abe got scared Pharaoh would kill him to get Sarah, so he lied and told Pharaoh that Sarah was really his sister. Pharaoh took her in as a concubine! She could have had his children! Anyway, after the truth came to light, Grandpa Abraham was kicked out of Egypt in disgrace.

Well, ten years passed, and it looked pretty bleak for him to father a great nation with old Sarah, so it was her idea to give him her Egyptian slave, Hagar, and Hagar bore him a son named Ishmael.

But then, low and behold, a miracle! Old Sarah conceived and bore a son, my grandfather, named Isaac. Well, that changed things. Sarah got jealous of Hagar and Ishmael, and so she told Abraham to get rid of them.”

“Get rid of them?” I asked, hoping I had misread him.

“Yes,” he said, confirming that I had not. “She told him to get rid of them. Permanently rid of them. So he took Hagar and little Ishmael, his own son, out in the desert and left them to die. (But somehow they lived through it.)

“Anyway, some years later, when Granddaddy Isaac was a boy, Abraham heard a voice telling him to kill Isaac, so he took him up a mountain, tied him down, and was about to gut him when God stopped him.”

Stunned, I interrupted again. “How did your grandfather, Isaac, deal with that trauma?” I asked.

“He never was very assertive,” Reuben said. “Must have done something to him. Anyway, then Grandpa Abraham sent a servant back to his homeland to get a wife for Isaac.”

“He couldn’t get his own wife?” I asked.

“I told you, he was never very assertive,” he said. “Besides, Grandpa Abraham wouldn’t let him go.”

I was quite curious about how this would work. “How did the servant pick a wife for Isaac?” I asked.

“Oh, she watered his camels,” he said, as if that answered it all. “Anyway, her name was Rebekah, my grandmother, and she was quite a looker too. In fact, once, Grandfather Isaac took her to live in a foreign land, and he was afraid the king would kill him to get her, so he told everybody she was his sister.”

“Sounds familiar,” I said, “how’d that work out?”

“Same way,” he said. “The truth came out and they were kicked out in disgrace. Anyway, my father, Jacob, was a twin, but he was born second. But he tricked his older brother, Esau, into selling his birthright as firstborn, then, with Rebekah’s help, he lied to Isaac, who was blind by this time, and tricked him into blessing him thinking he was Esau. Boy, were they mad! Isaac was really ticked, and Esau hated his brother. They eventually made up. Not because of anything Dad did, though.

“Rebekah helped?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Rebekah made no bones about the fact that she favored Jacob over Esau. It was very clear, especially to Esau.”

“Who’s your mother?” I asked.

“Leah,” he said. “She’s got beautiful eyes, but she was always Dad’s second choice. Dad worked seven years for Rachael, her younger sister, but her dad, my maternal grandfather, cheated him. He had to marry Leah first and then work another seven years for Rachael.”

“That must have upset him,” I said.

“Oh, it turned out all right,” he said. “Dad cheated him right back and got really rich out of it. Just about cleaned the old boy out,” he said, laughing.

“Uh, huh,” I said, taking a deep breath. “So they’re two wives, a real blended family?” I asked, although it was not like any blended family I knew.

“Well, actually there are four wives, or at least, two wives and two concubines. Can we move on?” he said.

Sensing something, I said, “Tell me about the other wives.”

“Oh, they were just servants of Leah and Mom. They became concubines, no biggie.”

Trusting my instincts, I asked, “What are you not telling me?”

“Alright, alright,” he said, “I slept with one of them. Is that what you wanted to know?”

I took a deep breath and spoke slowly. “I just want to be sure I got this right. You slept with your step-mother?”

“Pretty much,” he said. “Dad’s concubine, actually, but, pretty much, yeah.”

“Did your dad find out?” “Yeah,” he said, with a tone that told me how that had gone.

We sat in silence for a minute. I wondered if he could tell that I was praying. Finally, when I felt my strength starting to return, I asked, with a touch of dread, “So why are you here?”

And then he told me the story: the twelve sons of Jacob, ten from Leah, two from Rachael. How Jacob had always favored Rachel. How Rachel had not had children until late, so her sons, the two youngest of the twelve, were like a second family. Jacob had named Rachael’s first-born “Joseph,” which means, “Add.” The ten sons of Leah had been doing just fine, then this kid had been added on. And Jacob made no bones about preferring him, either. He had made him a special coat; it was a symbol of their father’s favoritism, and the older boys hated Joseph for it.

Beside that, Joseph was a spoiled brat. He would run to Jacob and tell him bad things about the wives or his other sons. And he had dreams about the older boys, and even his parents, bowing down to him. And he went around telling everyone until Jacob finally had to tell him to stop just to keep the peace. Obnoxious kid.

“So what brings you here?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

“Well . . . we did something,” he said.

“Who is ‘we?’” I asked.

“My brothers and I,” he said.

I thought, “Oh, God!” but I said, “What did you do?”

He hesitated, then jumped in: “Well . . . we threw Joseph in a pit and took that coat of his and tore it and smeared it with goat’s blood and told Dad he’d been killed by wild animals.”

“What happened to Joseph?” I asked in alarm.

“They wanted to kill him,” he said, clearly trying to make himself look good, “but I talked them out of it. Then Judah, another brother, talked them into selling him. ‘No money in killing him,’ he said. So they sold him into slavery.”

“Who bought him?” I asked.

“Ishmaelites, I think,” he said. “Going to Egypt, apparently.”

I stared at the ceiling and said more to myself than to him, “So the descendents of Ishmael, the son of Abraham and a slave he brought out of Egypt, the son he sent into the desert to kill, have bought Abraham’s descendent as a slave, and are taking him out of the desert into Egypt?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said, “if you want to look at it that way.”

“Did Jacob learn the truth?” I asked.

“No. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him. He thinks Joseph is dead. He’s inconsolable. That’s why I’m here. I want to do the right thing, you know, be pastoral to him in his grief. Have you got a book I could read or something?”

OK, now we’re caught up on Abraham’s family. This Bible, it’s not for the faint-hearted, is it? This family makes the Jerry Springer Show look like a manual for healthy relationships.

So, why talk about this? Well, first of all, it’s just too fascinating to pass up. But there’s more than that. Every one of us comes from a family, and many, many of us come from families that have some pretty major dysfunction. Favoritism, alliances, abuse, disdain, disrespect, some loved too much, some loved too little, secrecy, deception; the list goes on and on.

I’ve talked with lots of people about lots of families. And sometimes, I encounter people who think that their family, of some aspect of their family, traps them, that the dysfunction in their family is like a black hole from whose gravitational pull they can never fully free themselves.

This family history is for those people. Because I’ve talked to lots of people about lots of screwed up families, but I’ve never talked to anyone whose family was as screwed up as this one.

The message to them, perhaps to you, is this: God worked even in, even through, this profoundly screwed up family. However you’ve been victimized in your family, however you’ve victimized others in your family, never think that it’s hopeless, that God’s redemptive, loving purpose cannot be worked out there, or that God could never use someone from a family like yours to do God’s will.

Stick with the story and you’ll see — God has big plans for Joseph. Let God work in your story and you’ll see — God has big plans for you.