When things go wrong in families, sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint blame. Resentments can run so deep therapists have to dive into the bottom of the gene pool to figure what’s back of it all. But this Jacob family isn’t hard to figure at all.

To begin with, Jacob is Jacob. The patriarch of the clan is a scallywag, kind of a J.R. Ewing type. He’s married four times, which is challenging for any family, especially with all the kids that come of these unions. But Jacob also loved one of his wives four times more than the other three combined. And his firstborn son by that wife, Rachel, was Joseph, whom he loved twelve times more than the other eleven sons combined. He even gave the boy a special long-sleeved coat—the fabled coat of many colors. The thing about it having long sleeves is that you couldn’t do manual labor in it. The gift made it clear Joseph was crown prince of the family, even though he was son eleven.

Joseph himself doesn’t help matters: he rubs salt in his brothers’ wounds. He tattletales on some of them to Daddy about how they weren’t very good shepherds. Kids, does anybody like a tattletale? Then there’s the dreams he feels compelled to share. The first has him in the field with his brothers. They are bringing in the sheaves, when suddenly, as if in a Saturday morning cartoon, Joseph’s haystack comes to life and stands upright, towering over the others. Then the brothers’ sheaves come to life, circle round Joseph’s sheaf and bow down to it. The brothers are not amused. Dream two even makes Daddy wince. The sun, moon and eleven stars all bow down to Joseph. Gee, wonder whom those heavenly lights represent? Jacob tells his boy to tone it down, but he’s just being his father’s son, don’t you know?!—just showing the family colors.

Joseph’s dreams turn out to be prophetic after all, but he’s kind of like a preacher telling stories on himself in his sermons where he is always the hero. Bad idea. We like our preachers humble, right? We like to know that the one who is telling us how to do things right is also like us enough to be doing things wrong at times. I am right or wrong?

So here’s the way things stand as we get to the today’s episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent. The brothers hate Joseph so much they can’t even speak a civil word to him. That’s the set-up for the scene that begins in verse 12. Daddy knocks the young prince off the couch, switches off ESPN SportsCenter, boots him out to the field to check on his brothers. It’s not exactly a family reunion.

I just came back from one of those. First time ever. My mother’s side. We had them all the way from Norway. I met people I didn’t know existed; some I even liked. Crossville, Tennessee: perfectly logical for a family that started in Norway and settled mostly in Staten Island and Queens. There were 60 or so of us, all with stories to tell about Grandpa Nilsen and Great grandma Jacobson, about their parents and brothers and the Depression and the old country and the wars, oh, and the patent on the gas shut-off valve that got stolen from Great grandpa Nilsen that would have made us all rich.

I hadn’t been together with so many of my aunts and uncles and cousins since I was a kid. What I noticed is that although a lot of water has passed —and a few kidney stones too, some same old stuff resurfaced. We fell back into old roles in the family. It wasn’t that one of us was wearing the coat of many colors; it’s just that we started showing our true colors after a while. Old patterns of coping show up under stress: who gets to play with whom, who gets to speak for the family, who gets to offer the blessing, if not receive it. Family reunions are events in the life cycle—like births and weddings and deaths—when the door to the cellar is unlocked and ghosts are allowed to roam free for a while. Fortunately, in my family, they are mostly Casper-the-friendly- ghost types. But how families manage their anxieties and rivalries in moments like these is critical to the future of the family.

Israel’s sons don’t manage things well when Joseph comes out to play. They conspire to kill him. Here comes the dreamer, they say. Let’s show him his worst nightmare. So they scheme up a plan to murder him, throw him in a pit, and tell Daddy they found his bloodstained coat after a wild animal had killed him. The oldest son, Reuben, can’t bring himself to do it, though, so he tells them they should just throw Joseph in a pit and abandon him to the wild animals. He figures to rescue him later and bring him back to Daddy with no harm done. We aren’t sure whether Reuben is a good guy or sees a chance to get on Daddy’s good side; let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. But either way, the plan backfires. When Reuben is off stage taking a potty break or something, the other boys sell Joseph to Gypsies who then sell him into slavery in Egypt. Reuben comes back and is hardly relieved. So they make up their story about finding the bloodstained coat and go with that. Father Israel cannot be consoled.

How do we handle family conflict? Can a family learn to change its colors? Clearly, yes. There is no hint in this text that things had to be the way they were. Even the dreams of Joseph wouldn’t be told if the brothers had acted differently. That they are told is only a way of saying that God is not thwarted by our free-will bad decisions. God always finds a way, because God’s colors are not our colors; God’s ways not our ways. God is always in search-and-rescue mode rather than seek-and-destroy.

I was moved by the story of the rescue of the nine miners in Somerset, Pennsylvania. The miners were working 240 feet below the surface of the earth when they broke through the wall to an old abandoned mine that had filled with stormwater over the years. The rescue story is already in production for a TV movie. The thing was dramatic and tense, the outcome heart-throbbing rather than heart-breaking.

No one cast the miners into the pit, and no one stood around blaming them for getting themselves into such a fix. Townspeople joined the families in prayer and support. The nation held its breath and followed the story with sympathetic media. The governor was on site, along with unsung heroes that we otherwise call bureaucrats. Hard science coupled with hard praying to bring them up. All resources were marshaled. After much calculating, they found a way to find them, give them air, and raise them to life again. That was the single focus of everyone’s attention and efforts. These Americans showed their true colors, and those colors had the bright hues of God in them.

So are we all about burying people alive or raising them from the brink of death? Do we look for scapegoats to make ourselves look better, or do we celebrate the success of others and comfort others in their failures? Do we need to win at any cost, or do we find ways to make everyone win?

Two men more than any others made possible the preservation of our nation at the end of the Civil War—or as some of you prefer, the War of Northern Aggression! General Robert E. Lee had a decision to make before Appomattox: surrender his Army of Northern Virginia or take to the hills and begin a guerilla war that would have meant the Vietnamization of America. Lee decided that as a Christian man, he could not seek to win at any cost, that losing could be honorable. Abraham Lincoln, for his part, had to overcome his deep anger over the war. He considered the South treasonous. But as a Christian man, he would not bury them in the pit of defeat. With malice toward none; with charity for all, he would say in his second inaugural address, … let us … bind up the nation’s wounds…. And even after his untimely assassination, when that spirit was threatened by those in the North who wanted to punish the South rather than heal it, or those in the South who would destroy the nation with terrorism rather than accept defeat, Lincoln and Lee’s vision prevailed. What has happened in this country, surviving a civil war after so much division and death, is nothing short of a miracle. Can you name another country that has survived a war like this? It proves what is possible by the prescription of biblical values. Lee and Lincoln did not come to their decisions about what would be right by calling upon their native instincts. They chose to act according to higher values that brought healing. It wasn’t the colors blue or gray that won the day, but red, white and blue.

This is what has to happen in our families to bring health. If you wear the coat of many colors, pass it around. If your parents had the bad judgment to pit their kids against each other or to favor one over the others, forgive them first of all. Don’t confuse the way they view you with the way God views you. Then determine to build up and encourage your brothers and sisters rather than pitting yourself against them to gain some kind of advantage. When families play win-lose games, everyone loses. When love rules the family, everyone wins.

Churches have family colors, too. The good news is that Wilshire’s colors have been good to show. We have generally found ways to solve problems rather than make them, to love and forgive and include rather than undermine and punish and exclude. But it has to become a way of life, because there is never a time when all relationships are as they ought to be. We stay on high alert, because we are in the business of resurrection, not crucifixion.

Baptists have to learn this. If you ask the typical person on the street about the family colors of Baptist, what do you think he or she would say? Sadly, it would probably be that we are incorrigible fighters rather than passionate lovers; we are narrow-minded and cold-hearted. Why is that? Partly because of the way we talk about each other, both in public and in private. Here’s a test I give myself: Do you want Southern Baptists to succeed in their mission or make fools of themselves? Which? I have no desire to hold their values or to approach the faith the way their leaders do, but I have no right as a Christian man, as General Lee put it, to win at the expense of their honor.

We could say the same thing about the systems at work or at school or among nations and peoples. The only hope is that we adopt the family colors of God. We have to learn the power of forgiveness and mercy, the power of the resurrection that lifts people out of pits instead of casting them into them. It’s the power that builds dignity instead of stripping it. It’s the power to give life instead of taking it.

So that coat you are wearing today. Is it showing off the colors of God or only your own?