CHILDREN OF EXODUS
A
Descendent of Joseph
A
monologue for a boy or girl
By
Robert Allen
“So
Joseph died at the age of a hundred and ten. And after they embalmed him, he
was placed in a coffin in Egypt.”
Genesis 50:26
We
have the strangest piece of furniture in our front parlor. I guess you can’t really call it furniture
since we would never sit on it, but there is no doubt it is strange. Sitting in our front parlor is a coffin.
Now
I know that some of you might have had a casket in your home for a short time
just before a funeral. But this coffin
has been in our house since I was born, and long before that. In fact, my mother told me that it was there
on the day she got married. My
great-great-great-great grandfather Joseph was at their wedding, in his coffin.
That’s
who it is, of course. Joseph. All of my friends know his story because we
study it in Hebrew school, but none of them have to live with his coffin every
morning, noon and night. They can forget
about him as soon as they get home from school.
Joseph was a great man
here in Egypt almost four hundred years ago.
He had a dream about a famine which was coming, and the Pharaoh made him
the overseer of the entire land, all the crops, and all the cattle. He was the second-most powerful ruler in all
of Egypt. And he saved the entire land
from famine. That’s when the rest of his
family decided to move down to Egypt from where they were living. Joseph was so
powerful that when he died the Egyptians just naturally wanted to embalm him
according to their customs and place him in a sarcophagus and bury him in their
city of the dead, or maybe even in one of their pyramids. But my ancestors wouldn’t let them.
“Joseph
himself told us that he wanted to be buried in the Promised Land,” they
said. “You can embalm him and hold an
Egyptian funeral, but some day we are going to take his body back to the
country God gave to Abraham and bury him there.”
So
the Egyptians had their big funeral, and then they brought the embalmed body in
its coffin over to our house and left it there in the parlor.
Like
I said, that was four hundred years ago.
Most of the kids I go to school with tell me that their families gave up
on returning to the Promised Land ages ago.
But they don’t live with Joseph’s coffin in their parlor. Every morning when we get up we are reminded
of that promise my ancestors made to Father Joseph. Every night when we gather in the parlor for
evening prayers Father Joseph is there, begging us to take him back to his
homeland.
I’ve
heard that there is man named Moses who has been going to Pharaoh every day and
asking him to let God’s people go. So
far it hasn’t worked. Instead the king
has been making the men work even harder to the place where a lot of people are
asking Moses to be quiet. But I think
that maybe Moses is on to something. He
sounds an awful lot like my ancestors say that Joseph sounded. He is absolutely convinced that God wants us
back in the land of promise. So, who
knows, maybe one of these days Father Joseph will get his wish and we will get
our parlor back.
Of
course, it wouldn’t be this parlor. We
would have a new house in a new land. We
would be free from this slavery to the Egyptians. We would once again live in the land which
God promised to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph. We could worship Jehovah the way He deserves
to be worshipped. And Father Joseph
would finally be at rest.
‘
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