Episode 1: Funerals & Festivals

Katie Laitkep: Okay, you’re probably rushing around from task to task, working on your never-ending list. But would you pause for a few minutes and remember the big picture? Erin Davis has an important question for you.

Erin Davis: When your life is over, when my life is over, what will our families say about our legacy? Will they say you were a source of joy, of comfort, that you were a source of great wisdom to them?

Katie: That question is relevant no matter what our families look like; whether you’re married or single, whether you have biological children or not. We’re all building a legacy. We’re all influenced by the community and families around us.

This season of The Deep Well is all about God’s ability to bring hope and purpose from your family, even when it seems like that family has been marked by dysfunction.

Here’s Erin to get us started.

Erin: I think it had to have been a really hot day for a funeral. In fact, as I’m picturing it, I’m imagining sand sticking to people’s tears as they were mourning. This very large family was gathered around the casket of somebody they loved. He was embalmed, and he was probably already in an Egyptian sarcophagus; that was the tradition where this man died. It’s possible that hieroglyphics were carved into the sides of a stone casket.

The funeral was happening in the land of Egypt, but the body was not going to stay there, because the man who had died, as his brothers gathered around him on his deathbed, he made them make a deathbed promise that they would not leave his bones in Egypt. They promised that someday they would take his body to another place, a promised place.

I’m talking about the funeral of a Bible character that you’ve probably heard the story of many, many times. It starts way back in Sunday school that we start talking about this man. He’s long been beloved, and maybe you’ve already guessed who it is—the funeral in Egypt could have been a dead giveaway if you know your Old Testament.

In this season of The Deep Well, we’re going to be looking at the life of Joseph, which is found in the book of Genesis. Now, Joseph’s story didn’t start at his funeral (of course). But I wanted to start there, because funerals have a way of bringing to the surface all that is really true about our families.

I have a close relationship with my pastor, and I’ve heard him tell lots of hilarious stories—many of which I could not repeat here—of how families behaved at funerals that he was the pastor of. They’re hilarious to me because it wasn’t my family that was acting foolishly, putting our worst foot forward. But it’s often true at funerals. I’ve been to enough of these to know that what happens is that fault lines that were already present in families become earthquakes. Or to switch my metaphors, seeds of jealousy or bitterness or resentment or anger often sprout up at the bedside of the dying. You didn’t think that was just your family, did you?

Because of sin, all families are broken. That’s one of the big ideas of this series. I’ll tell you that as we look at Joseph’s life, we are going to see a tremendous amount of dysfunction. My hope is that through Joseph’s life you’re going to gain some new perspective about your own family and the dysfunction that I already know is in your family. 

So we’re going to start at the end, at Joseph’s funeral, and we’re going to trace our way all the way back to before Joseph’s beginning. Along the way, we’re going to look for clues and try to discover, how does God work in our dysfunctional families?

I hope that through Joseph’s life you’re going to catch a vision for, first, how God designed our families. And then how He works in our families when that design goes awry, despite our dysfunction. That’s a way bigger task than I could ever do. I need the Holy Spirit to do the heavy lifting here, so let’s pray.

Jesus, we love You and You love us, and family is Your idea. So I pray for everyone who will ever listen to this podcast series, that You would give us fresh hope for our families, that You would give us fresh vision for what it means to have families built on the rock of your Word, and that where there is brokenness (and I’m sure there’s brokenness for everyone listening) that You would bring plenteous redemption. It’s in Your name I pray, amen.

Okay, it’s time for me to say my favorite words: open your Bible! We’re going to be in Genesis for most of this series, and we’re going to start in Genesis 50. This is the funeral that I was describing earlier. Let me read to us Genesis 50:22–26.

So Joseph remained in Egypt, he and his father's house. Joseph lived 110 years. And Joseph saw Ephraim's children of the third generation. The children also of Machir the son of Manasseh were counted as Joseph's own. And Joseph said to his brothers, “I am about to die, but God will visit you and bring you up out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” Then Joseph made the sons of Israel swear, saying, “God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here.” So Joseph died, being 110 years old. They embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.

Long after the day of Joseph’s funeral, another patriarch had something interesting to say about the value of sad occasions. I’m talking about King Solomon. You might remember him as David’s son. He asked the Lord for wisdom, and God gave it to him. Ecclesiastes 7:2 is a famous wisdom nugget from Solomon, and he wrote this: 

It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.

I often paraphrase that passage with this two-word dichotomy: funerals and festivals. If we have to pick one of the two, the wisest man to ever live says we should pick the funeral.

That’s not exactly a happy thought, but unless the Lord returns, there will come a day when you and I are the ones inside the coffin. The families we are building today will be gathered around our bodies.

It’s a sobering thought. Here’s one that’s equally sobering, and honestly, I hadn’t thought a ton about it until I studied the life of Joseph. When your life is over, when my life is over, what will our families say about our legacy? Will they say you were a source of joy, of comfort; that you were a source of great wisdom to them? Or, when you’re gone and they can say whatever they want about you, will they say that you were critical, that you were easily angered, that you were constantly offended? 

What did you build your family life around? What are you building your family life around right now? Is it love? Is it charity? Is it forgiveness? Is it one of my favorite family attributes, fun? I hope I’m a very fun parent. Or are you building your family on something else? I’m not going to give you a list there, because there are endless options of what we could be building our families on.

 

I know those questions are kind of personal, and most of us don’t like to think about what’s going to be said about us at our funeral. But I feel like Joseph’s story compels us to ask the hard questions about how we are building our families. Because, in tracing Joseph’s family line, which we’re going to do together, one thing is crystal clear: God-honoring families don’t just happen. They’re built one decision at a time.

Before we get to Joseph’s beginning, we need to get to the very beginning. Flip to the left in your Bible with me to Genesis 1:27. I’ll read it to us.

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

When God made the very first family, Adam and Eve, he made something special. He made something set apart. How do I know that? Because in this passage he’s telling us that man is made in his image.

Now, humans aren’t the only ones with families. That’s not what makes us distinct. The Madagascar tenrec deserves lots and lots of flowers on Mother’s Day, because she is the mammal that has the most babies at one time. Every time that mama tenrec delivers children, she has thirty-plus babies at once! Then there’s the fact that wolves and beavers and vultures are among a long list of animals that mate for life, although I don’t think they have weddings, but isn’t that the YouTube fodder of our dreams? Animal weddings, right?

But humans are distinct in that we bear the image of God. That’s what’s happening here. We see trinitarian language—first of all, God and family. He’s saying, “Let us make man in our image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

So the fact that we bear the image of God distinctly has implications in the way we ask God to build our families.

If you know the first few chapters of your Bible, and I hope you do, soon after God created that first man and that first woman in His image, there was the first wedding. It doesn’t really matter what I’m teaching on; I seem to always gravitate back to these first few chapters of our Bible. I think it’s really helpful to remember the perfect shalom that God had in mind for mankind when He created us.

We see it in that first marriage described in Genesis 2:24–25. 

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

One of the things I hope you get out of this podcast is all kinds of tools for how to study the Bible on your own. Here’s one you can use right now. I want you to look at that passage, and I want you to share what phrases jump out at you. Let’s just do it here in the room. As you look at those verses, Genesis 2:24–25, what words or phrases jump out at you?

Mary: I’d have to say “therefore,” because then I always have to look back.

Erin: Yes, Mary said “therefore,” which is a great tool to have in your Bible study tool belt. Yes; what is the “therefore” there for? It’s an indicator that you need to pay attention to what was said before. That’s a good word to pay attention to. What else? What jumps out at you from those verses?

Sandy: “Hold fast.”

Erin: Hold fast! Yes, I have that in my notes. It’s this idea of clinging to each other, holding tightly to each other in marriage.

Woman: “Not ashamed.”

Erin: “Not ashamed”; that’s in my notes too. I don’t think we have any concept of what human relationships look like without the attachment of shame. 

You’ve got it: therefore, hold fast, one flesh. Even those of us who have been in church for a long time, we know that saying, but we have no idea what that means for two to become one.

I was at a funeral of some friends not long ago. They’d been married for fifty years and the wife died of cancer. I thought, What does it mean for two to become one flesh, and then to become two again? Because her husband was still walking around, very much alive, and we were putting her in the ground.

I also think “naked” is an interesting word to jump out at us. They were exposed, and then it says, “yet without shame,” or “were not ashamed.” This is the perfect shalom marriage that God had in mind—perfect unity, perfect vulnerability, no shame attached.

It’s foundational that God’s good design for families is this essential building block for human flourishing. God intended us to flourish within our family relationships, to which I think, no wonder our families are constantly under attack.

So, “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes (of course) the baby in a baby carriage.” We see that this was part of God’s good design as well. We have to go back to Genesis 1:28, where it says, 

And God blessed them [this first couple]. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth . . . and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food." (vv. 28–29)

What we see in this early picture of families is that God designed our families to be incubators for fruitfulness, distinct in our authority. We are supposed to play an essential role in God’s grand plan for creation. When was the last time you thought of your family in those terms?

I don’t know about you, but I need my vision recalibrated to this all the time. The goal is not just to get married. The goal is not just to stay married. The goal is not even to just be happily married—which I am, in case you were wondering. But the goals is to somehow put the mystery and the image of God on display through my marriage. The goal is not just to raise good kids, although I am—I want to. But through raising kids, I’m supposed to produce some sort of lasting fruit that impacts God’s world.

Genesis was not a one-off. Our relationships with our families are part of the Ten Commandments! If you’re a little rusty on that, look it up. It’s in Exodus 20:12–15. God promised to fulfill His covenant through families. The Psalms and the Proverbs are full of wisdom for how we interact with our families.

Have you ever asked yourself this question: “Why do we call God Father?” Because that’s what Jesus called Him. Why do we call Jesus the Son? Because that’s the name Jesus gave Himself. His favorite and most-often-used name for Himself as He walked the earth was “Son of Man.” God Himself gave us family language to talk about God Himself. It’s not an accident.

Last, but certainly not least, God uses family language to describe His own relationships with us, His people. So, as we consider God’s work in and through our families in this series, I want us to keep this simple and powerful premise in mind: family is God’s idea. You didn’t think your family was your idea, did you? We’re living in an era that says that family is a social construct, and if it is a social construct we can tear it down and build it anyway we want to. But what we see in our Bibles is that that’s not true. The family is God’s idea.

Family is designed by God, why? To reveal who He is and to subdue and to cultivate the world He has made. Lest you think that God doesn’t take how we operate within our families very seriously, I’m going to have to hit us with 1 Timothy 5:8 in this very first episode of this series. It’s kind of the mic drop when it comes to understanding how God feels about our families. It says this:

But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

That’s some pretty strong language coming from Paul! Here on The Deep Well we operate from an essential premise that comes from 2 Timothy 3:16. It’s this: that all Scripture is God-breathed, and it’s all useful.

So, we have to look at how God speaks about families throughout all of Scripture. Here in Genesis, yes, we get the message that family is God’s idea and that He intends for it to be fruitful. But here in the New Testament we get this idea that God takes this very, very seriously, and that somehow, how we operate within our families is connected to our faith, and how we demonstrate our faith in Jesus Christ.

So, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Paul was writing that, in some mysterious way that I admit I don’t fully understand, failing to care for the people who live under our own roofs or share our last name or will gather around our Thanksgiving table . . . failure to care for the branches of our family tree, somehow it equivocates to denying the faith, and in some way being worse than those who do not know Christ.

Now, this may be an old show from the 90s—it might make you think of Urkel, but it’s also a biblical truth—Family Matters. Most of us don’t have picture-perfect families. Scratch that. None of us have picture-perfect families. Adam and Eve’s pictures were perfect, but not for very long.

Joseph’s family could make a very interesting episode of a day-time talk show. There might be fists swung; there might be chairs flipped over; there certainly would be accusations made. But what was true of the first family and was true of Joseph’s family is true of your family: God is working to redeem even the most broken families.

 

I think it starts with the desire to see God accomplish His good plan that He laid out for us here in Genesis. So for now, let’s start there. This season is meant to be highly, highly practical. So, let me leave you with three questions as we wrap up this first episode.

What is your family built on? If you could list a bunch of adjectives that accurately describe your family, what would it be?

Several years ago I read an article that asked this question: what is the hearth of your home? Now, that might feel like an old-fashioned thing to think about. A long time ago, before there was HVAC, there was an actual hearth. Your heat came from a fireplace in the middle of your home, and that was the place that your family gathered. Well, I still have a fireplace, but it’s not always the place that we gather around. So the question is this: what is it that you want your family to gather around?

Jason and I had a conversation after I read that. We said, “What is it we want to build our family around?” First and foremost, we want to build our family around our shared faith in Jesus Christ. The other one might feel less important, but it’s not less important to us. We decided we wanted to build our family around fun; that we would have as much fun with our children as they were growing up and beyond as we could. 

It changed the way we structured our home. I took our Bibles out of cabinets and put them on the coffee table where they’re easy to grab. I got a bunch of new markers and coloring books and put those down low where my kids were. We planned some trips, because we want fun and faith to be something our family gathers around.

What is the hearth for your family?

Question number two: What do you want your family to be built on? Because even though I would say, big picture, my family is built on our faith in Jesus and is built on our love to have fun together, there’s more there. I want us to be built on other things, and that’s going to take intentionality.

The third question, which I hope to answer in this series, is, what does God want your family to be built on?

Jesus, thanks for this time, thanks for Your Word. I pray that You would give us a fresh vision for our families through this series. Help us to do the hard heart work of building our families the way You intend. It’s in Your name I pray, amen.

Katie: That’s Erin Davis, reminding us that dysfunctional families are nothing new. You know, that phrase may have caught on in our lifetimes, but the idea behind the word “dysfunction” goes all the way back to the book of Genesis.

Hey Erin, I know we’re going to be studying some crazy stories together as we look at this colorful family of Jacob and his children!

Erin: Aw, Katie, you’re so nice! Colorful is a really nice to way talk about this family, because crazy is more accurate. There are so many levels and layers of dysfunction in this family that we’re about to talk about.

I’m actually really glad you’re along for the journey—not because you’re crazy or dysfunctional—but as I was preparing this series, I wanted to think about all the different ways families can look, all of the things family can mean. Your family in this season of life looks a little bit different than mine, but we all are united by a couple of things. One, our dysfunction—that’s the bad news. But two, our need for Jesus. That’s the really good news.

Katie: I am so excited about this season and what is coming next, because we’re about to get into Erin Unscripted, where we’re going to get to talk to you and make things even more practical about each area of life.

But before we do that, I wanted to take a minute to remind people about your latest book. I have had it on my desk all week long. It’s called Fasting & Feasting, and if anyone thinks the Bible isn’t relevant to life, they should go on this journey in this book with you. In the book, you help us discover times when God calls His people to fast and then times when God calls His people to feast and celebrate—which I know is probably our favorite part, is the feasting and celebrating.

Erin: Yes, we love the feast! We don’t need equipping there. But there’s more to learn.

Katie: In that book we are challenged to devote a relationship with food to the Lord.

Erin: That’s true. I’m so glad you’re reading it, and I certainly hope other people will read it. You can grab your copy by visiting ReviveOurHearts.com.

Erin Unscripted

Katie: Alright, this is my personal favorite part! On each episode of The Deep Well we are going to bring you a part of the program called Erin Unscripted.

Erin: It’s my favorite part, too, Katie! I just never know what’s going to happen, but I’m along for the ride.

Katie: Well, in today’s episode, we’re going to let members of the audience ask you questions.

Woman 1: Erin, what would you say to someone who comes from a broken family? How can they find a family even if they came from one that’s broken, and not be fearful about that?

Erin: That’s a funny turn of phrase, because we’re all from broken families, as we’ll see. I’m from a broken family in the traditional sense, in that my parents divorced when I was a little girl. I understand the long-term implications of that. But I am married to my husband and intend to be until death do us part, and I’m still in a broken family. So, that’s a label that got slapped onto me as a little girl, and I understand what it means. But I would just say, we’re all from broken families. There’s not necessarily divorce in Joseph’s family, but there is a tremendous amount of brokenness, and a parallel vein of hope and restoration. So we’re all broken, and God redeems our brokenness. That’s my answer.

Woman 2: Erin, why is this series called “Dysfunction”?

Erin: Well, I’m always trying to get us to look at our Bibles from a different perspective. Sometimes that means we study a phrase, or sometimes that means we study a theme. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about family and the Bible, and I’m glad that we do. But I haven’t heard it often looked at through the lens of our dysfunction, which we all have.

I had some friends and colleagues encourage me to teach exegetically, just take a chunk and teach through it. I was very drawn to Joseph’s story, because it’s very complicated. It covers a fair amount of Scripture—several chapters—and it has implications much further down in Scripture. But we’re going to see a tremendous amount of dysfunction. 

So I just wanted to reframe. I think we can sometimes think of Joseph’s family as this patriarchal family that contributed so much good to the faith, and we can idealize them. That can be true, but they are tremendously dysfunctional. So I don’t know; I’ve taken some pleasure in discovering that Joseph’s family—which of course is Abraham’s family, Isaac’s family—was just as dysfunctional, maybe more dysfunctional, than my own.

Does anyone here know what you would want your hearth to be, that thing that you want your family to gather around?

Woman 3: I actually thought “fire,” and then I thought the fire of the Holy Spirit.

Erin: Love that. Me too. I’m going to add that to my list.

Woman 4: Well, I would like it to be about the Lord Jesus Christ and the ideal life that He would desire for us to have, which I know is impossible, but that would be my desire.

Erin: Yes. Anybody else know what you want your family to be built on or gathered around?

Hannah: My parents, more often than us having family devotions, we would get together and just sing hymns. So our family really was centered around singing the truths of God’s Word, and I would like for my family to do the same.

Erin: That reminds me of a story. I went to Alaska to teach the Bible, several years ago. A Christian family invited me to come in. They were the only Christians on their remote fishing village island, and they sang hymns every night. I stayed with them, so I got to sing hymns with them. Tears rolled down their faces, because they’d only heard each other singing hymns for many, many months, so to hear the family of God sing hymns with them was so powerful. I didn’t grow up in a family that sang hymns, but they gave me the desire for that.

Woman 5: I was just going to say the truth of God’s Word, with so many other things out there, to be grounded in the truth of God’s Word.

Erin: We remodeled our house, and we took it down to the studs, ripped all the floors out. As we were rebuilding it, we put Scripture everywhere. With Sharpies we put it on the subfloors. We put it on the studs before we put the drywall back up. We put it under the paint before we painted. We put it in the cabinets, because of that exact thing. If you walked into my house you wouldn’t see any of that, but I wanted my family, my house, so to speak, to be built on God’s Word. So it really permeates my home in ways you can’t see.

Woman 6: I would say, I didn’t think my kids were very friendly growing up. I have a boy and a girl. Now that they are in their early twenties, I would say deep friendship—a genuine, deep bond of friendship—is something I would treasure.

Katie: Now, Erin, if anyone feels like they come from a dysfunctional family, I already know this series is going to encourage them. That means that all of us are going to be encouraged in some way.

Erin: That’s right, because we all experience dysfunction in our families, which means that we all need the truth of God’s Word in order to build a new legacy.

Katie: Now, I have good news! The entire series, “Dysfunction,” is available right now. So, we’ll see you in episode two!

The Deep Well with Erin Davis is part of the Revive Our Hearts podcast family, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the ESV.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.